From the Vault: The Gray Whale, Part 1

the gray whales migrate too every year. Specifically, we went to Ojo de Labra lagoon that means eye of the hair due to the way it's shaped. And yeah, I got to see these magnificent animals close up, got to observe them for a couple of days. It was absolutely fantastic and certainly ignited my curiosity about these creatures.

but it's it's it's a unique landscape. Like just flying into Guerera Negro, the nearest town, was was really breathtaking just because the landscape is so beautiful. But the first morning we went out on these boats, there were also these intense fottamorgana mirages on the horizon that really added to the surreal feel of the place.

a time. There was no chasing of the whales, there was no feeding of the whales that they don't eat while they are there. And we'll get into the reasons for this as we move through these episodes. But there's no need to chase and there's no need to try

and bait them in, because they're very curious. They come up to the boats, they inspect the boats, and sometimes they're obviously scraping their skin against the holes of the boats, perhaps to relieve themselves some of the parasites that they have, the exo parasites, and we'll discuss that as well, probably well in this episode. Actually, other times, though they're not

scraping against the boats. Sometimes they're just kind of pushing them around a little bit, like playing with them, I guess, to try and figure out what their mind might be. Other times they're just kind of breaching a little bit. They're spy hopping, and they seem to have some sort of interest in what's going on in the boats or with the boats. Humans will reach out and touch them, and it seems like the whales like this on some level.

It's a very very very strange situation, Like it feels kind of like certainly there's a sense of curiosity on both sides, but there's also this, you know, if you want to get spiritual about it, there's almost this feeling of communion.

away from the boats as well. And and then yeah, sometimes they're rolling around in the water and kind of and you'll even like look into their eye that sometimes they are looking up through the water at you. And that's one of those moments where you're just you know, you're you're thinking about like what are they seeing? What are they possibly thinking as they look up at us,

what do they think we are? And then you also look at this whale and you just, man, I was just thinking, like they've they've seen things I can't even imagine, you know, And this this particular whale is going to see things just in the months ahead that that I can scarcely imagine.

least from what I've seen, several things stand out. One that they kind of I don't know if this makes any sense, but they look more like rocks than any other type of whale I can think of having seen, and that may be aided by the many barnacles attached to the outside of them, which is we'll talk about later on, are very characteristic of the species of whale, having a lot of barnacle loading on the outside, But in looking at them, they can look very much like

a large gray boulder covered in lichen, almost where the barnacles are kind of like the lichen patches, or at least it seemed that way to me. And then the other thing being that their nostrils look more typically mammalian rather than the blowhole that you would see on the back of a lot of whales, where you might perceive at least as a single blowhole. Uh, the gray whale nostrils I recall seeing are very distinctly separate nostrils. They kind of flare more like a dog's nostrils might.

they're blowing that blowhole. There's this mist in the air of water, and also I guess probably some some whale snut in there as well. But they do have to your point, they do have this kind of rocky appearance. Part of it's the barnacle load, but also that their their their skin is very modeled and and scarred and and it it could look like it is it is stone. When if you do touch it, I thought that it

felt more or less like a big egg plant. That's the kind of feeling I had from it, Like there's a little like there's a softness to it, but there is also you know, it's like a that's kind of wet suit feeling as well. Another thing about their skin is I and we'll come back to this, but I was surprised by their whiskers. We've talked on the show before about the evolution of whales and the loss of

body hair, so I wasn't prepared for the whiskers. Somehow I missed this leading up to this whale experience, but they have quite a few whiskers. The other thing that I was surprised about because on some level I was prepared for this gentleness, so I was prepared for this curiosity. I knew what I was getting into with that. But also you would see them moving underneath the water, and these are big animals. There were talking fourteen point nine meters or forty nine feet in length, weights of up

to forty one tons or so. So these are like school bus sized organisms, and they're often very curious and gentle next to the boat, but they can move with such speed and strength, and you see that occasionally, especially when they're engaging in mating behavior further away from the boats. They'll they'll surge underneath the water and you're reminded just how powerful and how potentially destructive these creatures are if they had if they had reason to be destructive towards you.

of the devilfish. I have no account that it ever maliciously attacked an unoffending object, yet when it found itself pursued where escape was difficult, even before it was struck, it has been known to turn upon pursuers and dash a boat to fragments with a single blow of its powerful flukes. And so has many a life been lost?

for instance, whale lice, which we'll discuss. They're not actually lies, but whalers compare them to lies, and that's where the name comes from.

the coast of Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. But this population was essentially extinct by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, do at least in part to whaling. Interestingly enough, there have been proposals to try and introduce reintroduce the North Pacific gray whale into this region to restore the population.

And I've also seen speculations about what might occur in the future due to climate change, that as we have less sea ice, it might enable the gray whales on their own to recolonize this part of the ocean.

audio program. You can certainly look up lots of great images and footage and illustrations. One of the books that was one of my prime sources here as a book by Mark Carwoodine The Handbook of Wales, Dolphins and Porpoises of the World. Highly recommend this book for anyone out

there who's into Wales, dolphins and porposes. Fabulous illustrations and some great photographs and just lots of wonderful information that you know can aid you just sort of in general general interest in these organisms, or if you're into citing them and has you know how to pick out these various creatures by their markings, by their spouts, by their flukes, that sort of thing. So that's going to be one of the books I'm going to keep referring back to,

for sure. But getting back to what we were talking about earlier. Yes, these are whales. These are large creatures, large whales by some rakings, I think they're only the eighth largest whale species. But considering that number one, the blue whale, is the largest animal that's ever lived, there's not really no shame in coming at number eight. Gray whale can reach forty nine feet in length. That's the

fourteen point nine meters way about forty tons. The females are larger than the males, and even the newborns are approximately fourteen to sixteen feet long. It's roughly four point two to four point eight meters and weigh around two thousand pounds or around nine hundred and seven kilogram. So we're talking about big reachers here. Cannot stress that.

or maybe a gray brown. However, it's also acceptable to consider that we dub them gray whales in reference to British zoologist John Edward gray Gry who lived eighteen one hundred through eighteen seventy five, who placed the whale in its own genus in eighteen sixty four. On top of that, its scientific name is as Richtius robustus, referring to nineteenth century Danish zoologist Frederick Eschricht who lived seventeen ninety eight through eighteen sixty three.

Now again you can put all of your sort of cartoon whale appearances to the side, because the reality is somewhat different, not only with the blowholes, but for starters, we should point out that this is a bleen whale, not a toothed whale. Baleen whales were once toothed whales earlier on in their evolution, and we do have fossil evidence of whales with both teeth and bleen, but they have adapted. The gray whales have adapted to thrive as pure filter feeders.

skimming them from the water. Meanwhile, fin whales gulp up water full of fish and or krill and then push the water out as if through a sieve. But the gray whales are different. They're the only modern balen whale that dives down deep, and I mean this is deep relative to the waters they inhabit. These are not deep water whales. They're not like sperm whales. They tend to stick to coastal regions in the continental shelf, but they'll go down deep for these regions, and they'll feed as

bottom feeders. They'll turn on one side, and interestingly they are there is like a right handedness to the gray whales. Most whales seem to favor their right side, but some do left instead, and they'll vacuum the water up, vacuum up water, mud, sand, and most importantly various organisms there in the muck. And then they'll use their tongue to push out the mud, sand and water.

for straining out the things that they need to eat. Now, as for what they're eating out of the muck, Carbeting points out that a good eighty species of fish and invertebrates have been identified as gray whale prey. However, most of the prey that they consume consists of benthic and planktonic organisms. Planktonic meaning, of course, plankton and benthic organisms being various isopods that live abundantly in the sand. Apparently benthic amphipods make up a good ninety percent of their diet.

But they're they're reasonably opportunistic and may also be shifting their foraging habits in Arctic waters due to climate change. So basically, my understanding based on the reading here is like they're going down to the mud and the muck and the sand to get most of their food, but if they happen to encounter some sort of plankton on the way up, you know they're going to breathe it in. They're going to go ahead and take that in as well.

They're typically diving down thirty to sixty meters, but they may go up to one hundred and twenty or even one hundred and seventy, and again, opportunistic feeding may happen at any depth, but the seabed is their main target now. The summer is their prime feeding period, and of course

they're large whales they're eating large meals. They'll eat anywhere from like one to one point three tons of the stuff per day, and the remainder of the year entails a lot of fasting, including their migrations too, and from these calving and mating lagoons.

like the sperm whale, a toothed whale. They have a stocky body with a hump two thirds of the way down their back, along with eight to fourteen quote unquote knuckles. Further down. They don't have a dorsal fin. They just have a small hump. And like I mentioned earlier, they have whiskers, and apparently they have more whiskers than any

other whale. I was not prepared for this, but the whiskers are very prominent, and I was reading about this on the NOAA website and they point out that these are more or less like the whiskers you'd encounter on any mammal. They are tactile sensors. Now, Carboning notes that in the older whales, though many of these whiskers are quote unquote obliterated by scarring and barnacles.

my god, these poor whales. This must be a purely parasitic infestation where the whale is dying because of all these barnacles on it. I think it's more of an open question exactly what the symbiotic relationship between the whales and their barnacles is. Is it parasitism, is it mutualism? Is it a commensalism? Commensalism where the barnacle would get a benefit, but it just doesn't really matter to the whale. We're gonna address that in a minute.

Now there again, there may be, like you said, there may be a little more nuance to exactly what the relationship might be between the barnacles and the whale lice and the whales, but for the most part, they're often referred to as exo parasites, so we're gonna probably keep using that term, even if we're going to, you know, put an asterisk by it and come back to it. They do have quite an exo parasite load, and newborns

are born without any barnacles, without any lice. They're an almost uniform dark gray, almost black color, so aside from being smaller, you can definitely identify them in the water based on their coloration. But they swiftly obtain these parasites as well. In addition to of course scarring from not only the parasites but also from threats and feeding. It gives them a very highly variable appearance, and by feeding I mean their own feeding, going down and scraping themselves

against the bottom of the sea floor. Before we get into the barnacle, though, I want to talk just a little bit about the whale lice, because this is all part of the exoparasite load, which, according to to Carwodine, adult gray whales carry more exo parasites than any other whale species on average, more than one hundred and eighty kilograms or three hundred and ninety six pounds of the stuff.

half a percent of the body weight. So if you translate that to a human I don't know human, somebody weighs one hundred and fifty pounds, what's half of one percent of that body weight on the outside of them? Oh, I don't know. It is having like, you know, three quarters of a pound of parasites on the outside view that bad.

they end up scraping off the barnacles. Anyway, the one whale that we saw scraping against the bottom of the boat, there would be this colossal scraping sound and then like a cloud of pieces of barnacle, and like I guess, maybe some dried skin and probably some loose whale lice would come floating up through the water.

the largest a little over an inch. A lot of the photographs you see of the barnacles on the bodies of grey whales, you can also see the lice clustered

around them. They have this kind of the kind of like these kind of ridges on their bodies, though they may not be moving during the footage, and they live in populations up to seventy five hundred on a single whale, and they generally live and die on the same whale, though there is some degree of transference that takes place when the whales are in close confines with each other.

But they have no free swimming stage in their development, no stage in their development at which they're swimming free, and they're running across other whales. If they're gonna jump ship, they've got to like jump ship straight to another whale. Yeah, but all this, like the branding of whale lies, it just made me sort of automatically assume, well, they're drinking whale blood, clearly, that's what they're doing, but that's not what they're doing. Carbodin notes that they don't drink blood.

They eat whale skin that's come off just you know, like old essentially like eating dry skin, except in the water. They're possibly eating a little bit of bacteria and algae as well, and they'll also eat damage tissue, so, Carbodine writes, quote, though usually considered parasites, they might be more accurately described as cleaning symbians.

cycle is synchronous with that of their hosts. And he knowes elsewhere that there are four species of whale acorn barnacles in general, in three genera, but we're talking about one particular species of acorn barnacle that is found on the skin of the gray whale, and that is Cryptolepis ratchionecti. Sorry barnacles if I butchered your scientific name a little bit there. Joe, you were kind enough to include a lot of close up images of ant of acorn barnacles

in our notes here. Would you describe these for the listeners?

to animals like shrimp and crabs. And when you've seen barnacles in the past, probably the main thing you've noticed are these external plates, which are made of calcium carbonate. They're made of the same material as eggshells or oyster shells or coral skeletons and so forth, and in barnacles, these calcium carbonate plates can have different appearances. Some kind of like flower buds made out of stone, or some look like cement pumpkins. Some look like tiny volcano calderas.

If you zoom way out, some of the colonies look as I mentioned earlier, kind of like you know, groupings of lichen on a piece of granite. But if you zoom in and you see the shapes and you see the kind of holes at the top of each barnacle, they also kind of resemble the photos that people freak out about online. And I'm never sure how much of this freak out is kind of performative ironic thing, but about like trip to phobia images, you know, the lotus

pod thing. I don't share this reaction, but while reading about barnacles, I came to glean that some people are deeply viscerally repulsed by the appearance of them. And I didn't even know if I was gonna mention this, but I was seeing a couple of cases where there'd be like an article on the internet about barnacles or that

featured pictures of barnacles. Then you scroll down you look at the comments, and some people are reacting not just with disgust, I mean, there is plenty of that, but with like moral outrage at the author for posting these pictures,

like you did something bad by showing me barnacles. I don't quite get that, but I think it may overlap with the triptophobia thing, which, as I said a minute ago, I still am not sure how much of that is kind of like the creepy clown thing, like like I fear that people are playing up on purpose to be funny, or how much like their moral rage is just like a genuine emotional overload reaction.

these sort of round aperture appearing barnacles. I think our minds instantly go to poor anomalies. We think of like clogged pores, we think of pimples, we think of various openings that may occur in diseased flesh, and that's maybe where our mind goes, like, that's the nearest analogy that we have as surface dwellers and uh, and so we we think about all that when we see barnacles on, say a whale.

you know you want to sort of help the creature. Again. You think of it almost like a dog, Whereas if your dog came up and your dog had some sort of always the seed pods or something stuck in its fur, like, you'd want to help it out. If your cat has a has something stuck in its fur, you're going to reach in there and and pull it out and get bitten as a thank you. But the whales, they're not asking for this treatment.

life as a free swimming organism. It's just one of the trillions of zoa plankton bobbing around out there in the ocean, and as a larva, the barnacle's primary mission is to find a home. It's looking for real estate it can stake out where it will spend the rest of its life. It does this by exploring various surfaces and testing the properties of these surfaces. A lot of species are attracted to chemicals secreted by adult barnacles that let them know they have encountered a good place to

swarm and congregate. And when the larva finds a surface it approves of, it proceeds to glue its head down permanently. So the barnacle secretes a form of quick drying adhesive from its antennae, and it cements itself and this is again head down to the place where it will spend

the rest of its life. Apparently, barnacle cement is one of the strongest, if not the single strongest adhesive substance known in nature, so much that scientists have studied it in hopes of developing better synthetic glues for use in medicine and microelectronics, especially in conditions where you need to

glue things together that are already wet. That's kind of interesting property, as like, so you're already under the water, both surfaces are wet, so how exactly do you glue this together effectively?

begins eating and growing. And the barnacles shell on the outside typically consists of plates that surround the animal on all sides to form a kind of cone, and then usually a few more plates on top that form a sort of door that the barnacle can close when it's threatened or closed to conserve moisture, say, if it's in an intertidal area, when the tide goes out, the barnacles exposed to the air can close up its door to keep some liquid inside, and then of course it can

open them again when it is time to feed. Barnacles are filter feeders, much like bilein whales, but while whales feed by pushing water through their bleen, barnacles feed by waving their feet around in the water. Barnacles have these little legs called seeri, which are segmented like the pindages of other crustaceans, but covered in long little filaments, so they look like a cross between curly shrimp legs and peacock feathers. Rob I've attached some pictures for you to

look at while I'm describing here. So they often get they'll kind of like fan these out, and they do really kind of look like a fan a bunch of these legs arranged in parallel with these little feathery kind of hairs coming off of them, and they essentially function like fishing nets. The barnacles wave these cirii through the water, collecting plankton and organic detritus and then drawing them into the shell to bring the food to their mouths.

with that. Then you wave your feet around in the air until you catch i don't know, something dead with your toes and your leg hairs, and then you bring that down to your mouth.

can't go wandering around to locate a mate. Other sessile organisms deal with the fact that they are immobile by simply kind of spamming the water with sperm and eggs and hoping to you, hoping that those sex cells meet up with opposite sex cels somewhere out there. This is known as broadcast spawning. I've read it alleged in many

sources that barnacles never do this. They don't do exactly that with both sex cells, but it does seem some barnacles engage in sperm casting, or at least the sperm but not the eggs, are released into open water just in hopes that it will drift to an individual with

an egg cell. This is according to one paper I found by Marian barizandai at All called Something Darwin Didn't Know About Barnacles Sperm cast Mating in a common stalked Species, published Proceedings of the Royal Society b Biological Sciences in twenty thirteen. This experiment found that Pacific intertitle Gooseneck barnacles

do sometimes fertilize eggs by sperm casting. But this result was surprising, and the very reason it was surprising was that for the most part, barnacles have a different strategy. They actually physically copulate, or as the scientists call it, pseudo copulate, in order to exchange sperm, which means they

have to find a mate by reaching. So for this reason, it has been suggested that barnacles probably have the longest penis to body size ratio of any animal on Earth, with penises measuring more than the rest of the total length of the body many times over. I've read different estimates for this. Exactly how much longer it is seems unclear, but a commonly cided figure is eight times body length. And these are used kind of how you might imagine.

They sense around. They feel around at their neighbors to find neighbor to pseudocopulate with, and barnacles can act either as males or females for the purposes of mating, so they all possess these penises, and they are fascinating and remarkably adaptable organs depending on environmental conditions, so like one factor is the choppiness of the water around them, so they will grow longer in calmer waters, but shorter and thicker and choppy turbulent waters, because as you can imagine,

long thin appendages are more difficult to control when the water is moving around a lot. But these the properties of this organ also depend on the density of barnacle population. So when neighbors are nearby, they don't need to reach as far, so they will be shorter and less elastic, But when neighbors are sparse, when the population is less dense, they grow very long and elastic.

So it's no good for a barnacle to sit around in calm, still waters. They want flow in exchange.

common problem in shipping. But for millions of years, before there were ships, there were whales, giant boulders that swim, and.

But looking at whale barnacles in general, I wanted to return to this question of what is the exact symbiotic relationship between whales and their barnacles. Are the barnacles actual parasites causing net harm to their hosts, or is the relationship an example of what biologists would call commensalism where the host is not really impacted one way or the other, but the barnacle gets a benefit. Or is it possible there are mutualistic benefits. Do both the whale and the

barnacle get something good out of the relationship. It seems like for a long time experts thought that whales in their barnacles were generally an example of a commensal relationship. So the barnacles get a benefit, get the benefit of a moving substrate to bring them a steady flow of plankton,

as well as getting general protection from predators. And you can see this reduced risk of predation when attached to a whale body in the fact that whale barnacles in particular, have evolved to possess a less defensively oriented outer plate structure they usually have rob If you compare pictures of different kind of barnacles, it seems like whale barnacles often just have more kind of fleshy bits poking out of

their shells at all times. They don't close their plate doors completely or as completely, so they just seem like they have to be less focused on defense than some of the barnacles are.

not a perfect analogy. But I was reading from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation about the effect of barnacles on ships built by humans, and they write, quote, the US Navy estimates that heavy barnacle growth on ships can add weight and increase drag by nearly sixty percent, which can lead to as much as a forty percent increase in fuel consumption. Now, obviously those figures don't map exactly onto an organism like a whale, but the principle holds true.

It seems clear that barnacles would make a way a less efficient swimmer, even if only by a marginal percent. Also, the fact that whales have been observed to engage in behavior that looks like an attempt to remove barnacles would probably also mean that they are at least somewhat perceived as a nuisance by the whale, at least assuming those

interpretations of that behavior is correct. Now, Rob, I can't remember if you mentioned it earlier, but you had said something to me about observations of whales appearing to want to scrape barnacles off their body, maybe by rubbing up against things. And maybe we don't understand exactly what the purpose of that behavior is, but it's been interpreted as an attempt to remove barnacles.

lies they're scarring. There's reason to believe that. I guess a whale could itch for other reasons, or have some sort of skin irritation for other reasons, and it might be pleasurable for other reasons for it to scrape its body against something, even if that scraping does in effect remove barnacles from its skin.

imagine by looking at it. But what has been proposed is that barnacles may serve as a form of armor or as a weapon in some cases. Now, what would the evidence for this idea? Well, I was looking at a paper by John K. B Ford and Randall R. Reeves published in The Mammal Review in two thousand and eight called fight or Flight Anti predator strategies of billen whales. Now, something we've already alluded to and we're going to talk about more extensively in the next episode is orca predation

on gray whales in particular. But orcas, also known as killer whales, are major predators to a number of mistacetti or billen whale species, and the authors of this paper argue that understanding the role of orcas as predators has been hampered by poor understanding of the different predator prey dynamics quote, including the relative vulnerability of different misseddeceit species and age classes to killer whales and how those prey

animals avoid predation. So, what are the different patterns of behavior that different prey species of whales resort to when an orca starts threat them, or when a pod of orcas threatens them. The authors argue there are two main classes of behavioral response, and those are fight or flight. The flight strategy is fairly simple. When you spot kular whales,

you get out of there. The authors describe the strategy as rapid monodirectional swimming away from the orcas at a pace of between twenty and forty kilometers an hour, a speed that the orcas cannot generally keep up with or will not keep up with usually, and this behavior has been observed in six species of the genus Baleinoptera, which

contains animals like the mink, fin and blue whales. On the other hand, many different species exhibit what the authors call the fight strategy, which quote consists of active physical defense, including self defense by single individuals, defense of calves by their mothers, and coordinated defense by groups of whales. It's documented for five mystic seats, and they list the Southern right whale, the North Atlantic right whale, the bowhead whale,

the humpback whale, and the gray whale. The authors argue that these strategies are not incidental, they are selected by evolution for each species to maximize survival odds based on the whale's other physical characteristics. Species that engage in the flight strategy have streamlined bodies that are capable of fast, sustained endurance swimming. They also quote tend to favor pelagic habitats, which that means open sea, deep water and calving grounds

where prolonged escape sprints from killer whales are possible. Meanwhile, they say that whales that engage in fight strategies tend to have more robust body shapes, and they tend to be slower swimmers, but they're also usually maneuverable swimmers, so they they might not be able to do monodirection, you know, swimming in one direction really fast for a long time, but they can kind of move around quickly within a small space if they need to, say, reposition their bodies

or deliver a blow. These species also quote often calve or migrating coastal areas where proximity to shallow water provides refuge and an advantage in defense. Most fight species have either callosities, which are rough and hardened patches of skin, or incrustations of barnacles on their bodies, which may serve either primarily or secondarily as weapons or armor for defense.

So I think that's a really interesting inference here. Specifically, whales that are more likely to fight predators rather than run from them also happen to be the ones that are more likely to have either callosities, these raised calloused patches of skin, or colonies of barnacles on their skin, which, of course, you know, a colony of barnacles, you do not want to bite into that or get slapped with it.

And the authors right that humpback whales are believed to make use of these barnacle encrusted patches as weapons during fights between males at breeding grounds. They say, you know, there are many different kind of moves that humpback whales will do against each other when they're displaying aggressive behaviors to other males. They will do headbutting and ramming of each other, striking blows, and they will hit each other

with long flippers and tail flukes. And the authors point out that these parts of the body where they will hit each other are also parts of the body areas where there are large encrustations of barnacles usually found. They say, quote a blow from a barnacle encrusted surface would likely have enhanced effectiveness in aggressive physical interactions, and from this they go on to argue that these same types of attacks are probably used by humpback whales against predatory orcas,

and the barnacles probably provide an advantage in the same way. Now, the same is maybe not exactly true of gray whales, because they say gray whales don't fight quite as much. They don't show examples of intraspecific aggression associated with male competition like the humpback whales do, so the males are less often fighting each other like humpback whales. But they say that barnacles on the skin of gray whales could still help protect the whales as basically a type of

defensive armor. So if an orca tries to ram the body of a gray whale and it's got an incrustation of barnacles on it, or they try to bite the gray whale and they bite them on an incrustation of barnacles, that seems much more likely to harm the attacking animal.

But on the same level, I mean, the whales are going to come into contact with each other and the barnacles to do scar other whales sort of at least incidentally, this was pointed out to us in Mexico by one of the local guides on the boats. Of course, they're covered in scars from various things, everything from orca attacks

two barnacles scraping them via contact with other whales. And yeah, this is an interesting idea though, because on one level, a really good blow from a fluke or a flipper from a gray whale I've read it is enough certainly to kill a man, but also could potentially kill an orca in one blow as well. But I guess you're not necessarily going to get that killer blow every time.

Sometimes you're just going to maybe make a lighter contact or a near my yes, and you can imagine those scenarios would be enhanced by some sort of barnacle encrusting possibly.

ones more likely to be encrusted with barnacles. Maybe there is a common cause, like barnacles don't actually make useful armor or make useful weapons, but the slow swimming that makes a gray whale have to rely on fighting rather than rapid escape also makes it more susceptible to barnacle infestation.

That kind of thing could be possible, But I think it's an interesting correlation, and it makes you wonder how you would test that further, Like could you compare different individual whales of the same species and look at maybe how much barnacle loading they have and then observe their relative success. It's a protecting calves from orcapods. Do mothers with more barnacles win more fights againsts and so forth?

indication of the effectiveness of these anti predator strategies. Bileene whales likely offer low profitability to killer whales relative to some other marine mammal prey. High speed pursuit of flight species has a high energetic cost and the low probability of success, while attacks on fight species can involve prolonged handling times and a risk of serious injury. So the balen whales here are not helpless against these orcas like

they put up a real fight. And if the orcas are going to eat a whale calf like the they will make them work for it.

get into this in the next episode. But I mean, that's one of the reasons the lagoons are safe harbors, is that is that that they have found a place to go that do not favor the old Orcus and the Orca's intelligent pack or pod hunters that they are. Uh, they will attack their most one of their most dangerous prey when they have the optimal advantage, when they have everything lining up for them. Uh, they're not gonna They're not gonna do it if they if they don't have a key advantage.

you can't remove them from the scenario. All right. Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and call it for this episode. We'll be back in the next core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind to discuss gray whales in greater detail. We'll talk about there there were more about the relationship with the orcas. We'll talk about some of the variety of orcas as well. We'll kind of go on an Orco's tangent and then we'll get

into more details about their migration and their reproduction. In the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Do you have experience is with grey whales that you would like to share with us? Write in we'd love to hear them. Heck, if you have any experience with whales, If you've any whale watchers out there and you want to tell us about other species of whales that you're super into, let us know. I'm all revd up on whales and dolphins and porpoises right now, so I'm excited

to see your photos and hear your stories. A reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film.