They cling to whales for a 10,000-kilometre joy ride along Australia’s east coast, scoring free meals along the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Remoras may just be the animal kingdom’s ultimate freeloader, but researchers say there is a lot to learn about the love-hate relationship these suckerfish have with humpbacks.<\/p>\n
“They’re hitchhikers in the ocean and it’s a very bizarre lifestyle too,” Griffith University’s Olaf Meynecke said.<\/p>\n
“It’s like this network, this web of life, and the whales are supporting this.”<\/p>\n
Dr Meynecke has been slapping suction-cup cameras on the back of whales to observe their behaviour off Queensland’s Gold Coast over the annual migration season.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Olaf Meynecke says remoras kept photobombing cameras designed to observe whales’ behaviour. (ABC Gold Coast: Dominic Cansdale)<\/p>\n
But after the cameras were being consistently photobombed by these whale-sucking remoras, Dr Meynecke decided to look a littler closer.<\/p>\n
“When we do work like this, where we discover new things that we’d not really aimed to discover, that’s what the true research is about.”‘Not big fans’<\/p>\n
Remoras hatch in the open ocean, using a suction cap on their heads to attach to larger animals over their seven-year life cycle.<\/p>\n
Dr Meynecke said they had a commensal relationship with hosts such as whales, eating sea lice, other parasites and even dead skin.<\/p>\n
“They will just switch between whales, they’ll move around, that’s where they mate and that’s where they find their food,” he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Remoras swimming around a humpback whale off the Gold Coast. (Supplied: Griffith University)<\/p>\n
“They’re finding their sweet spot where there’s the least amount of current and then they cruise with the whale \u2014 once they attach, they’re pretty safe.”<\/p>\n
But that does not mean they are not irritating.<\/p>\n
“It’s a coexistence but we’ve seen [whales] eyeing them, literally looking at them, and we’ve seen them actively breaching when they have a lot of these remoras,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It suggests generally they’re not big fans.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Tens of thousands of humpbacks migrate along Australia’s east coast each year. (Supplied: Tracy Olive)<\/p>\n
Dr Meynecke said his team had observed whales shredding large amounts of skin \u2014 a potential sign of stress \u2014 attracting large numbers of remoras.<\/p>\n
“The whales are supporting \u2026 a completely different species,” he said.<\/p>\n
“With that species probably come other species that attach themselves to the remoras \u2014 there may be remora hitchhikers too.”<\/p>\n
A lot of unknowns<\/p>\n
PhD student Sarah McCulloch has been studying whales for almost 10 years.<\/p>\n
“They don’t get the memo of what you’re trying to study,” she said.<\/p>\n
“They don’t care that you want to see feeding behaviour, or this behaviour. They’re wild animals, they do what they want to do.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Griffith University researchers attach a suction-cup camera to a humpback whale. (Supplied: Griffith University)<\/p>\n
She said capturing vision of remora behaviour by coincidence opened up new lines of research that could benefit future conservation efforts.<\/p>\n
“We think humpback whales are doing really well, particularly in Australian waters.<\/p>\n
“But we don’t know going into the future if that’s going to continue \u2014 there’s a lot we don’t know.”<\/p>\n
Dr Meynecke said learning more about remoras would give insights into the health of the whale population they depended on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Remoras give researchers insights into humpback whales. (Supplied: Griffith University)<\/p>\n
“We always talk about how important whales are for the ocean, and here they are being a bus, picking up all these travellers and moving them up and down the coast,” he said.<\/p>\n
“[But] is every remora going down to Antartica, probably not, how many times do they switch hosts, how far north are they going?<\/p>\n
“There’s a number of unknowns.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They cling to whales for a 10,000-kilometre joy ride along Australia’s east coast, scoring free meals along the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,141839,123183,152196,152194,337,128,152195,152197,18204],"class_list":["post-258430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-griffith","tag-humpbacks","tag-ocean-hitchhikers","tag-remoras","tag-research","tag-science","tag-suckerfish","tag-web-of-life","tag-whales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}