The Gray Whale, Part 1

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the enigmatic gray whale, noted today for its vast oceanic migrations and curiosity, but known as “devilfish” for its ferocity by the American whalers who hunted it in the past. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick. This episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and I suppose the next
one as well will be dealing with gray whales. This

(00:23):
is a topic that I was inspired to cover because
my family was fortunate enough to get to go on
a trip to Mexico, to the Mexican state of Baja California,
sir to one of the breeding lagoons that the gray
whales migrate too every year. Specifically, we went to Ojo

(00:43):
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.

(01:03):
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,

(01:24):
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

(01:47):
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,

(02:09):
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

(02:32):
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.

(02:56):
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

(03:16):
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,

(03:39):
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

(04:00):
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

(04:23):
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,

(04:45):
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

(05:07):
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

(05:29):
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,

(05:52):
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

(06:14):
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

(06:35):
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

(06:57):
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

(07:17):
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

(07:39):
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,

(08:01):
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,

(08:27):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:13):
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.

(09:36):
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,

(09:59):
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

(10:21):
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

(10:43):
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

(11:05):
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

(11:28):
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

(11:48):
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

(12:12):
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

(12:32):
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

(12:54):
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

(13:15):
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

(13:37):
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

(13:59):
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.

(14:22):
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,

(14:45):
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

(15:06):
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

(15:28):
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,

(15:51):
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

(16:12):
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

(16:34):
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

(16:56):
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

(17:19):
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,

(17:43):
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

(18:04):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:49):
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

(19:10):
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

(19:31):
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,

(19:52):
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

(20:15):
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.

(20:37):
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,

(20:58):
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

(21:21):
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

(21:42):
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,

(22:02):
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,

(22:23):
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

(22:43):
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

(23:05):
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

(23:28):
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

(23:50):
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

(24:12):
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

(24:32):
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

(24:53):
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

(25:17):
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

(25:40):
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

(26:05):
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

(26:26):
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,

(26:47):
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

(27:09):
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.

(27:29):
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

(27:50):
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

(28:10):
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

(28:30):
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

(28:52):
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,

(29:14):
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

(29:35):
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

(29:57):
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,

(30:18):
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

(30:39):
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

(31:00):
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

(31:21):
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

(31:43):
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

(32:05):
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

(32:29):
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,

(32:54):
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,

(33:17):
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

(33:39):
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

(34:02):
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

(34:25):
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

(34:47):
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

(35:07):
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

(35:30):
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

(35:53):
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.

(36:15):
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

(36:35):
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

(36:56):
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

(37:16):
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

(37:38):
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

(37:59):
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.

(38:21):
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

(38:41):
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

(39:03):
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

(39:26):
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

(39:46):
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

(40:09):
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

(40:32):
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

(40:55):
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

(41:17):
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

(41:38):
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

(41:59):
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,

(42:21):
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

(42:42):
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

(43:06):
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

(43:27):
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,

(43:48):
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

(44:08):
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

(44:30):
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

(44:53):
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

(45:14):
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,

(45:38):
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

(46:01):
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

(46:23):
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

(46:45):
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

(47:05):
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,

(47:25):
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

(47:45):
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

(48:10):
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

(48:31):
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

(48:52):
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

(49:14):
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

(49:35):
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.

(49:58):
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

(50:23):
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

(50:45):
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

(51:08):
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,

(51:29):
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

(51:53):
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

(52:16):
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

(52:38):
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

(53:01):
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

(53:24):
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.

(53:45):
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

(54:09):
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

(54:31):
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

(54:52):
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

(55:15):
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

(55:36):
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

(56:00):
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

(56:20):
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,

(56:42):
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

(57:03):
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,

(57:26):
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

(57:47):
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

(58:08):
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,

(58:31):
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

(58:52):
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

(59:14):
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,

(59:37):
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

(59:59):
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

(01:00:19):
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,

(01:00:40):
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

(01:01:03):
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

(01:01:24):
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,

(01:01:47):
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

(01:02:08):
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

(01:02:29):
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

(01:02:49):
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.

(01:03:13):
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,

(01:03:34):
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

(01:03:54):
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

(01:04:15):
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

(01:04:37):
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

(01:04:58):
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

(01:05:20):
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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