The Gray Whale, Part 1

whales migrate too every year. Specifically, we went to Ojo Delia Bray Lagoon. That means I of the hair due to the way it's 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. It was absolutely fantastic and certainly ignited my curiosity about these creatures. I didn't get to see your photos because I'm not

on the gram, but Rachel was raving about them to me. Yeah, I'll once this episode comes out off to share some maybe in the discussion module the Facebook group or our discord for the show, and if you don't have access to those. Just email us and and well we'll hook you up. But yeah, a lot. I got some great footage, my wife got some great footage, and and more than anything, we just got to take in this amazing location, this

amazing landscape, and these amazing animals. So this lagoon is one of their calving grounds and you were out in boats getting to observe them right up close right. Yeah, this um, this is one of several different lagoons where where where this particular population goes to. When we were visiting there, there were hundreds of whales present in this lagoon. It's a pretty vast lagoon. Um, it's surrounded on all sides with this kind of desolate and haunting landscape that's

full of like salt, sand and bramble. I mean, it's there. There are organisms they're either coyotes around and and other creatures, but it's um, it's it's a unique landscape. Like just flying into Guerrera 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, they were also these intense photam organa mirages on the horizon that

really added to the surreal feel of the place. What were they like images out they look like mountains or they were the surrounding um mountain, like some of the peaks that were visible on the and also some of the dunes, so like dunes and peaks. So yeah, it was and it looked like floating islands on the horizon. Wow. And then of course closer in you have all of these breaching whales and spy hopping whales and it's it's amazing. Now.

I do want to stress that in this particular situation, only a few boats were permitted on the water at a time. There was no chasing of the whales. There was no feeding of the whales. Um they don't eat while they are there, and we'll get into the reasons for this as we move through these episodes. But but there's no need to chase, and there's no need to it 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 to perhaps to relieve themselves with some of the parasites that they have, the exoparasites and we'll discuss that as well in probably in 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 they're just kind of breaching a little bit. They're spy hopping. Um, they 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. Um, it's uh, it's 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. So sometimes they'll kind of bring part of their body out of the water or breach. But also you said spy hopping is that when they raise their eyes above the water level to see what's

above the surface. Well, in other species, such as the orca um, there's there's definitely more of an eye coming above the water. With the with the gray whales, they're not even necessarily getting their eyes above water, so it's, uh,

you know, I think it's there. There's some differing takes on why exactly they're doing this, but they'll, yeah, they'll kind of spy hoop next to the boat, and they're spy hopping out further away from the boats as well, and um and then yea, 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 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 I can scarcely imagine. So

I'm very envious of this experience. And uh, and I would love to see gray whales up close one day too, But I have seen plenty of video footage and at

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, as we'll talk about later on, 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. M And then the other thing being that their nostrils look very uh more typically mammalian rather than the blow a hole 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 that kind of flare more like a dog's nostrils might. Oh yeah, yeah, this this is not your your cartoon whale. You have those those very nostril like blow holes on top of the head, and you if you're if you're out on one of these lagoons, you

see see that a lot. In fact, a lot of people end up getting spre You're constantly misted by the spray from them, even if they're not super close to the boats, just because you know they're they're just kind and up they're they're blowing that blow hole. 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 um and scarred, and it could look like it is it is stone um. When if you do touch it, I thought that it felt more or less like a big eggplant. That's the kind of feeling I've had from it, Like there's a little like there's a softness to it, but it is also you know, it's like a that's

kind of wet suit feeling as well. Oh, another thing about their skin is I and will 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 in leading up to this whale experience. But they have quite a few whiskers. Um the other thing that I was surprised about, because I'm 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 but also you would you would see them moving underneath the water. And these are big animals. They're we're talking uh, 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 they're often very curious and gentle next to the boat, but they can they can move with such speed and strength, and you see that occasionally, especially when they're engaging and mating behavior further away from the boats, they'll they'll surge underneath the water, and you're reminded just how how powerful and how potentially um destructive these creatures are if they had have they had reason to be

destructive towards you. You know, it's funny. This reminds me of all these passages in Moby Dick describing whales. We know now from plenty of examples like this, just like as a matter of habit do not seem to attack humans or do anything very aggressive, at least not most of the time. But described in these older documents with absolute horror, just like these whales are monsters. They are killers. They will crush you, they will swallow you whole. Yeah. Absolutely,

and in fact I ran across this wonderful description. This is from a paper in The American Naturalist from eighteen eighty eight by J. D. Katon, titled the California gray Whale. The author writes, quote, of all the known species of whales, this is the most cunning, courageous, and vicious. So terrible is it that, with the old implements of harpoon and lance, but few whalemen would court an encounter with it, and

it early received the name of the devil fish. I have no account that it ever maliciously attacked an unoffending object, Yet when it found it self 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? Okay, well, at least this source acknowledges that this kind of behavior would be like in response to extreme distress, like when the whale is

being attacked. Yeah. Yeah, he is acknowledging that like this, this is aggression that's coming out of obvious whaling scenarios. Yeah. And you know you the sad fact is, and especially this in the show before, you can't you can't remove

whaling from our understanding of these creatures. I mean that the history is intertwined there with our understanding of the organism, and so we have various things where the name comes from whaler observations, like, for instance, whale lice, which will discuss they're not actually lice, but whalers compare them to lice,

and that's where the name comes from. I do believe gray whales specifically are thought to have once been much more abundant, right, but that whaling in particular reduced their populations to present levels where there's a sustainable number of gray whales in the population on the western coast of the American continent, but the population that lives on the other side of the Pacific on the eastern coast of the Asian Mainland is much more reduced, but in both

cases reduced by whaling. Yeah, and then there was once a North Atlantic gray whale population. These were thought to have fed around Newfoundland, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Iceland, and Europe's North North Sea and for their winter breeding lagoons or refuges. It's thought that they might have visited the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas here in the States, as well as uncertain spots along the coast of Spain, Portugal,

and Morocco. But this population was essentially extinct by the late seventeen 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. I guess it would be very difficult and expensive to try to force a recolonization by human intervention, Yeah, because I mean nothing else. We're talking about enormous creatures and how are you going to get them there? I didn't, I didn't look super hard at the proposals. They may have a very straightforward solution

to this. I'm not sure if they would be airlifting them or shipping them across land or exactly what the scenario is, but it has not become an actionable thing at least yet. Well, let's talk a little bit more about the physical characteristics of the gray whale here. Because I guess we are um an audio program. You can certainly look up lots of great images and footage and illustrations. Uh. One of the books that was one of my my prime sources here as a book by Mark Carwardine, The

Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises of the World. Highly recommend this book for anyone out there who's into whales, dolphins and porpoises. Fabulous illustrations and some great photographs and just lots of wonderful information, uh 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 like you know, how to how to pick out these various creatures, by their markings, by their 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 these are whales. These are large creatures, large whales. By some rankings, 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 a 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 in wigh, around two thousand pounds or around nine hundred and seven kilograms, So we're talking about big creatures here.

Cannot stress that enough, And I guess it's helpful that the newborn calves are already big because it's when a whale is young that it's most susceptible to predators like the predation on adult gray whales, from what I understand, is pretty rare, whereas attempts by animals such as orcas to prey on the calves is pretty common. Yeah. Yeah, because the healthy adult whale is a healthy adult gray whale is a formidable opponent unless conditions are just right.

And then, of course, uh, the the young are going to be the primary focal point of predators. Okay, so we've established they're big, we should also come back to the fact that, yes, they are more or less gray in color, often look like just a big old slab of granite, kind of like an obelisk in the water. Yes. Now, one initial question that came up for me, of course, especially as we were dealing in our notes here, is it gray g R E y or is it g

r A y um. I generally assume those spellings are interchangeable. It's like American English or British English. That's how yeah, ye read it. Yeah, and that's one of the main distinctions. Um Mark Carterwine in his book stresses that that either is correct. You know, obviously gry is more common in British English and gray is more common in American English.

And generally we're referring to what has perceived to be the color of the creature, though much of its gray appearance is due to those accumulated barnacles, skin lesions scarring their actual skin, though is still often described as light to dark gray, or maybe a gray brown. However, it's also acceptable to consider that we dubbed them gray whales in reference to British zoologist John Edward Gray Gray, who lived eighteen 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 Estricht who lived seventeen ninety eight through eighteen sixty three. So it could have been the Eshricht whale. We we're glad that it's the gray whale. Yeah, yeah, rolls off the tongue for

us at any rate, a little, a little easier. It's been known by other names, of course, the gray back, the muscle digger, the mud digger, the scrag whale, ripsack, hardhead, and of course by American whalers the devil fish. That was the one referenced in that they quote from the

article in the American Naturalists from the nineteenth century. Correct. Yes, now there are no recognized forms or subspecies, though there are two possible sub populations according to Carwadine, So we have the eastern North Pacific and the western North Pacific gray whale. But there also seems to be some cross

breeding between these two populations in the Mexican lagoons. 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 baleen 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 baleen, but they have adapted.

The gray whales have adapted to thrive as pure filter feeders. So the baleen is a bristly material that lives inside the whale's mouth which they use to filter feed by. Well, there are various different ways the different species do it, but by by forcing water through these sort of sieves. Natural biological sieves the billing hares which capture the plankton or the krill, or the small bits of organic matter that the whales live on. Yeah. Yeah, and it's like

these these keratin baleen plates. And this is something I hadn't given a lot of thought to before. But there are different strategies to use with your baling. There are two main strategies. Two of the main strategies anywhere, gulping and straining, both carried out near the water surface by different species of whales. Baleen whales, like right whales, will slim swim through clouds of krill, open mouth, 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 baleen 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 and 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, but retain all these little organisms and

things they can digest in their billing. Yeah, and it's interesting, apparently you can tell which side a particular gray whale favors because the side it favors is generally more scraped up and deep barnacled, because that's the side that goes down in plows into the ocean floor. And also their baleen plates are shorter than in other extent whales. So these other baleen whales that use different feeding techniques, I think they tend to have longer balin for straining out

the things that they need to eat. Now, as for what they're eating out of the muck, Carveting 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 they're reading here, is like they're 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 gonna breathe it in.

They're gonna they're gonna 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 to and from these calving and mating lagoons. Okay, so they typically are going to be stocking up on food, they're eating, they're they're banging their heads into the sediment up in the Arctic waters, and then they migrate down

south for calving and rearing young. Yeah. Yeah, and um, yeah, so you might think of them as just this kind of enormous freight train of a creature that sucks up mud and anything in the mud in the sand from you know, from the waters that they inhabit and just eat all summer long, Yeah, and then go go south for the winter. Kind of the catfish of whales. Yeah,

they are. I thought about this as well. Yeah, they're kind of because the catfish for the bottom feeders, I grew up around and grew up here in about and so yeah, they're they're kind of using the catfish strategy, but on an epic scale. But don't try to go noodling for gray whales. No, No, that doesn't sound like a good idea now once a moll note, I think

I did read that there are some accepts. There seems to be some evidence that there are some whales that stay north for an extended period of time, but in general we see this migration occurring. Other important physical notes, just to describe them, they have slender and small heads even in relation to their body size, certainly when you compare them to amously big headed whales 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 NAA 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 Carveting notes that in the older whales, though many of these whiskers are quote unquote obliterated by scarring and barnacles. However, wow, if the barnacles are in some cases obliterating their sensory organs, I feel like that that offers some input on question we're going to address in a minute, which is about these barnacles. Now, we mentioned them earlier, but they are a very your feature

that people notice when they look at gray whales. It looks horrible. Some people think, you know, they look at this and they're like, oh my god, these poor whales. This must be a purely parasitic infestation where where the whale is dying because of all these barnacles on it. I think it's it's 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 going to address that in a minute. Yeah, it's I know some of you might be thinking like, I just want to hear about the gray whales. I don't want

to hear about the barnacles. I don't want to hear about the worka but but if there's the thing, you can't talk about the gray whale without talking about the orca, which will probably get into more in the second episode. And you can't talk about them without talking about their barnacles because they're just so so much a part of

who they are and when what they look like. Now there again, there may be, like you said, there may be a little more nuanced 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 exoparasites, so we're going to 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 exoparasite load. 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 to just a little bit about the whale lice, because this is all part of the exo parasite load, which according to it to Carbondine, 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, So

they get a lot living on them. Yeah, And I didn't do a breakdown of like how how that would that would that sort of parasite load would be like for the human body. But I think a lot of our repulsion to barnacles and these these these rather large whale lies is that. Yeah, we think about ourselves, we think about our pets, and if those were on us,

obviously we would want them remove pronto. Hold on, rob I just tried to do the math on the on the loading of the barnacles and whale license stuff by weight. So if we're saying that adult gray whales can grow up to a out forty tons, which is eighty thousand pounds, and then you compare that to you said they could have up to what like almost four hundred pounds of loading of barnicles and stuff. That is about half a

percent of the body weight. So if you translate that to a human, I don't know, a 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. Its having like, you know, three quarters of a pound of parasites on the outside of you. That bad. I don't know how many barnacles would that be? I don't know. M Let's say it's one barnacle which you put up with. That's way more than one barnicle'

that's a number of barnacles. Well, I'm being generous here. Let's let's go ahead and pare it down to just one, maybe two barnacles. I feel like that would still feel like one or two barnacles too many for us. But then again, we don't live in the ocean. We don't have barnicles, so it's not appropriate for us to really make judgment calls like this. Okay, Well, apologies for the rough math. I may have screwed something up there, but

of it I tried. Now I think you captured the general feel of it, because again we have to think about just how big these creatures are, and as we'll probably get into the barnacles or not covering them head to toe. It's not like a suit of barnacles. They tend to be clusters in certain places like top of the head, right behind the head, and some in other places. Yeah, yeah, they got patches, little colonies. Yeah. Yeah, they have to keep a low profile to keep from being pulled off

by the water. Though again they'll they'll often scrape against things, and I'm off the top of my head, I'm not sure if they're necessarily scratching to remove themselves, remove the barnacles from their body, or if they're dealing with like general skin discomfort or it has to do with the lice, etc.

But 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. That is gross. But to remind again you said earlier, I think you said that the lice on these whales are not actually lice in the sense that we usually mean

like the parasitic insects that can be found on land mammals. Right. Yeah, we call them lies because whalers saw them on the bodies of the whales they were slaughtering, and they were they just made the you know, I guess a natural comparison to be made to lyce that occur on human bodies, and they're like, oh, well, those are whale lies. But they're they're not lies. They're actually a type of crustacean that's related more to the skeleton shrimp, an organism we've

talked about on the show before. So what are the so called lice doing on these whales? Okay, So, if you pick up Carbadine's book, and again I recommend it for whale fans out there, he has illustrations of all four species of whale lies that you'll find on the gray whale. Three of them are are only found on gray whales, and then there's another variety that is found on gray whales and bowhead whales. But yeah, they're these

They get kind of big. They can be anywhere between three and thirty millimeters long, so at the largest a little over an inch. A lot of the photographs you see of the barnacles on the bodies of gray 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. They may live in populations of 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 confinance with each other. But they have no free swimming stage in their development, No, no stage in their development in which they're swimming free

and they're running across other whales. If they're going to jump ship, they've got to like jump ship straight to another whale. Yeah, but all this, like the brand ending 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. Carboding notes that they don't drink blood. They eat whale skin that's come off just you know, like 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 carboding, writes quote. Though usually considered parasites, they might be more accurately described as cleaning symbians awsome, maybe providing a benefit to the whale. Yeah, yeah, now, it's it's still worth noting that if there is an excessively large population, that might be an indicator of poor

health for an individual whale. But you know, that's you know, obviously, if an organism is in poor health, a lot of things are going to be out of whack, including the amount of creatures living on its hide. Yes, and that's true for organisms living on and in all kinds of other larger organisms. It's true for us, like our gut microbiome is useful to us. All of those bacteria in our guts are helpful, but if there something goes wrong

with our immune system, they can turn opportunistic. Absolutely. Now, coming back to the barnacles Carveding notes that quote the barnacles are thought to be host specific to gray whales, though there are isolated examples on captive bottlenose dolphins and beluga whales and one wild killer whale, and their life cycle is synchronous with that of their hosts. And he notes 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 RACHIANECTI. Sorry, barnacles if I butchered your scientific man a little bit there, Joe, you were kind enough to include a lot of close up images of art of acorn barnacles in our notes here.

Would you describe these for the listeners? Well, different barnacles have different outer appearances, and I guess this is because barnacles, much like coral, they are small marine invertebrates, but they are perhaps most visually notable for the external mineral structures that they build, and those structures can sometimes be confused with the flesh of the animals themselves. But barnacles are actually crustaceans, so they are closely related 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 front 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 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 resembled 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 tryptophobia 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 going to 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 trip to phobia 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 a fear that people are playing up on purpose to be funny, or how much like their moral outrage is just like a genuine emotional overload reaction. Yeah, I'm not sure either, but I will say that, you know, with the particularly with the acorn barnacles here, they look

a lot to me like the eye of sauron. They have that kind of appearance. Yeah, so there's something a little unnerving about them. Also, I think it's one thing to see barnacles like this on say the whole of the ship, or you know, barnacles of another variety, But when they're on a living organism, um, I think maybe

there's sometimes sort of category confusion going on. Yes, and particularly with these sort of round aperture appearing barnacles, we I think our minds instantly go to poor an anomalies. We think of like clogged pores, We think of pimples, we think of various openings that may occur in um diseased flesh. And that's maybe where our mind goes, like that's the nearest analogy that we have as as surface dwellers and uh, and so we think about all that

when we see barnacles on sale whale. Yeah, I can understand that, and I certainly share that I react differently when I see them on an animal versus on just you know, growing on the you know, the the piling that appear is resting on or something. Yeah, you know, seeing the whales in the wild and seeing one close up, like they're close enough where you could you could touch the barnacles if you wanted to. I did not, m and I only only touch the whale once. I'm like,

that's good. We need to make physical contact with the great whale once and I'm good. But you know, there is this kind of like feeling that that you end up having her. It's like should I help? Should I scrape? You know, not that you would, but you know you want to sort of help the creature. Again. You think of it almost like a dog, whereas you're if your dog came up and your dog had some sort of orrels, 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 uh and pull it out and get bitten as as a thank you. But you know, the whales, they're not asking for this treatment. Well, And as I'll get to in a minute, I think there's more ambiguity than we met realizing about exactly what the pluses and minuses of this relationship are, but a little more a little more about barnacles themselves. So the life cycle of

a barnacle goes like this. It begins as a microscopic larva that looks kind of like a cross between a flea and to shrimp. And in this larval stage, after being released by the parent, the barnacle swims around freely in the water column, so it begins life as a free swimming organism. It's just one of the trillions of zooplankton 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.

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? Interesting. Once a barnacle is fixed to whatever surface it has chosen, it begins building its calcium carbonate outer plates, and it begins eating

and growing. And the barnacle's 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, it 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 baleen whales, but while whales feed by pushing water through their baleen, barnacles feed by waving their feet around in the water. Barnacles have these little legs called cerri, which are segmented like the appendages 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 the 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 of these cri through the water, collecting plankton and organic detritus, and then drawing them into the shell

to bring the food to their mouths. Yeah, this image is very delightful, and I guess it's it's it's harder to hate on barnacles as much if you think of them as like tiny old people who set down forever on you know, say, the deck of a cruise ship, glue their butts down, and then begin to wave their fancily dressed legs in the air. Well. Yeah, that's right. It wouldn't be gluing their butts, it would be gluing

their foreheads down. So you would have to imagine the human analogy is if you lived by gluing your forehead to a rock and then surrounding yourself with external bone places like you grow some bones on the outside, their bones that live outside. You surround yourself 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. Okay, well that sounds a little more monstrous again, we're skewing monstrous again, but it's still delightful than Another really amazing thing about barnacles is their sexual reproduction. Barnacles, typically in the same individual, have both male and female sex organs, but they can't reproduce asexually. They don't bud like some other sessile organisms. They have to find a

partner to mate with, but they're barnacles. They are stuck to one place, remember, glued the forehead down, so they 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 to you know, hoping that those sex cells meet up with opposite sex cells somewhere out there. This is known as broadcast spawning. I've read it alleged

in many sources. The 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 Marion Barazande at All called Something Darwin Didn't Know about Barnacles sperm cast Mating in a common stock species, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society

b Biological Sciences in twenty thirteen. This experiment found that Pacific intertital gooseneck barnacles do sometimes fertile 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 reach, which 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 cited 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 a neighbor to pseudo copulate with, and barnacles can act either as males or females for the purposes of mating. So they all possess these penises, and they're 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 and 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 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. Yeah. I remember a friend of the show, Mara Hart, in her book Sex in the Sea as the whole section talking about barnacles and their reproductive strategies. Yeah, I remember Mara having a lot of

barnacle penis is officially amazing. But anyway, so as filter feeders, barnacles usually attached themselves to stationary objects in places with a lot of activity, whether that's a rock or part of a human built structure or something else that they will attach themselves to a place where there's a lot of exchange of water back and forth, because again they can't go out hunting. They need water containing their food to wash over them. So it's no good for a

barnacle to sit around in calm, still waters. They want flow in exchange, location, location, location exactly. Yeah, you want foot traffic. Oftentimes this means posting up in the intertidal zone where the tides are going to charge in and then drain out throughout the day. But if you're a really lucky barnacle, you could manage to attach yourself to a rock that moves, a rock that travels along its own course, causing water full of plankton and other goodies

to wash over you constantly. And for this reason you will see barnacles do well by attaching themselves to the hulls of ships. This is a common problem in shipping. But for millions of years, before there were ships, there were whales, giant boulders that swim, and of course before whales there were sea turtles. And I believe I was reading that whale barnacles derived from seaturtle barnacles. That's right. It is thought that whale barnacles evolved from what are

called turtle barnacles, which don't just occupy turtles. They found them the shells of sea turtles, but also other things like the carapace of crabs, and and on some sirenians like like manatees and so forth. But you can you can imagine the why this diversification takes place when whales become a possibility. Oh, these vast expanses of high to colonize, so many whales, especially filter feeding whales, are known to accumulate barnacles, but gray whales really excel as barnacle hosts.

In tons of pictures of these animals again, they just uh, you know, you will see them covered in patches of these things. There's one species of acorn barnacle you mentioned them earlier, called Cryptolipus racy and ecti. These have been allegedly living off of gray whales in particular for millions of years. 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 and 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 their barnacles are. This probably also contributes to the disturbing quality of to some to seeing barnacles on whales, because it's more obviously some sort of creature living on the whales hide and you can't just dismiss it as seeing some sort of stone like de try this that's built up there, right, So what's undeniable is that the barnacles get a benefit from the relationship. But is it true that the relationship is basically nothing

to the whale, neither helpful nor harmful. Well, this seems very debatable. For one thing, having barnacles on the skin would quite clearly reduce the hydrodynamic efficiency of the whales movement.

As a point of analogy, this is not a perfect analogy, but I was reading from the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation about the effect of barnacles on hips 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 whale 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, Robert I. Can't remember if you mentioned it earlier, but you had said something to me about observations of whales appearing to one us scrape barnacles off their body, maybe by rubbing up against things, and 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. Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding. And they'll do this not only on the bottoms of boats and chips, but they'll do this on rocks and in the sand, and also just through the act of feeding, because again, these are bottom feeding feeders who scrape half of their their body against the bottom of the sea. But yeah, I guess the thing we have to keep in mind is that it's not just the barnacles on the body, they're also the sea lies they're scarring. There's you know,

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 its skin. Yes, so there are several ways where you might be able to interpret barnacles as parasites as causing net harm to the whales. However, I came across

another idea that I thought was very interesting. Again, this is not certain, it's debatable, but some researchers have speculated there could be cases where whale barnacles are actually providing a benefit to the whale. Now, what could that be. It's hard to 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 be the evidence for this idea? Well, I was looking at a paper by John kb Ford and Randall R. Reeves published in The Mammal Review in two thousand and eight called fight or Flight Anti predator strategies of baleen 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 mysticetti or baleen whale speeds, and the authors of this paper argued 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 misdeceit 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 threatening them or when a pot 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 killer 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 Balinoptera, 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 whales 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 might not be able to do monodirection 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 calocities, 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 calocities, 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 write that humpback whales are believed to make use of these barnacle encrusted patches as weapons steering 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 incrustations 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 intra specific 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. 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.

This is fascinating. So on on one level, yes, than the mating of the gray whales, well, we'll probably get into that more in the next episode, but yeah, there's there definitely is more of a sort of a free love kind of vibe going on among the gray whales, So the males are not necessarily competing with each other, it seems and is now. But on the same level, I mean, the whales are going to come into contact with each other, and the barnacles 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. Um because they're covered in scars from various things, everything from orca attacks to barnacle 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 to 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 miss. And you can imagine those scenarios would be enhanced by some sort

of barnacle encrusting. Possibly. Now, to come back on that, you can imagine other reasonings as well that there might be this correlation where species that are more likely to stand and fight when attacked by orcas rather than run away, are also the 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 make 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 against orcas

and so forth. I mean, it's also worth noting in all of this that the young gray whales again have no barnacles. They're born without barnacles. They will accumulate barnacles, but it takes a little time for the hard barnacles to actually build up, so especially during that period when they're leaving those sheltered lagoons, this is when they're at

their most vulnerable for a number of reasons. However, it's all another thing the authors point out that I think it's where remembering is that whales, including gray whales, are not Orca's only prey, and they are an especially dangerous and costly type of prey for the orcas to pursue. The author's right quote, the rarity of observed successful attacks by killer whales on baleen whales, especially adults, maybe an

indication of the effectiveness of these anti predator strategies. Baleen 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 baleen whales here are 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 they will make them work for it. Though of course, yeah, they will work for it. They are hard workers the orca. But as is often the case, we've discuss this with various predator prey relationships, like it's it's every little bit of deterrent um that adds up to survival. Like anything that makes you a slightly more difficult meal than you, you increase the odds that the predators will realize that

this is not worth it. Yeah, and we'll get into this in the next episode. 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 orcas. And the orcas intelligent um pack or pod hunters that they are. Uh, they will attack their most one of their most dangerous prey when they have the 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. So I guess more on that next time. Yeah, wait, before we close out, what do you what do you think about the barnacle armor slash weapon hypothesis. You think that's got anything going for it or not? I like it. I certainly buy that at least partial encrusting with barnacles would perhaps provide this incidental extra level of defense or offense.

I just I'm not as sure how that maybe factors into um like the grander like evolutionary scheme of things, you know, Yeah, and how it balances out against I guess, uh negative impacts from say introducing dragon swimming and other things, right, yeah, or or mating behavior and so forth. But I mean, they've they've been scrapy with barnacles for a long time,

so they're they're accustomed to it. It is it is a part of who they are, which I think is one of the big take homs for again for thinking about gray whales and their barnacles and their life and their most notable predator like these these are are creatures that are not only a part of their lives, but they have shaped the life of the gray whale. They've shaped the gray whale is and you can't remove them

from the scenario. All right, Well, on that note, we're going to 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 in an orca'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 experiences with gray whales that you would like to share with us right in we'd love to hear them. Heck, if you have any experience with whales, if you've any 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 I'm I'm all revved 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 Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Friday's we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film huch. Thanks

to our audio producer J. J. Paseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.