{"id":311634,"date":"2025-11-28T04:27:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T04:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/311634\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T04:27:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T04:27:07","slug":"why-do-barnacles-attach-to-whales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/311634\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do Barnacles Attach To Whales?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why do so many barnacles end up hitching a ride on whales? Speaking to IFLScience, Professor Geoffrey Boxshall<\/a>, an expert on tiny crustaceans at the Natural History Museum London and Fellow of the Royal Society, explained several intriguing reasons behind the unlikely alliance between marine mammals and small, shelled sea beasts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Firstly, it might have something to do with the behavior of the whales. Boxshall explained it: \u201cCruising around the well-lit and productive surface waters of the oceans where small plankton, the food of the barnacles, is abundant.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Secondly, he added, \u201cthe large size of the whales provides plenty of surface area for attachment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lastly, the social habits of many whale<\/a> species may also play a role, offering barnacles more opportunities to spread to others.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhales aggregate for mating and feeding, and they often travel in large groups. This provides plenty of opportunity for the larvae of the barnacles to find and attach to the whales. Otherwise, it is a big ocean for the barnacle larvae, just 1 to 2 millimetres long, and they need to find their \u2018host\u2019 before their larval food supply is used up,\u201d Boxshall told IFLScience.<\/p>\n

Barnacles are taxonomically crustaceans, meaning they\u2019re related to crabs<\/a>, lobsters, shrimps, and prawns. However, they don\u2019t look like many other members of this branch of the family.<\/p>\n

\"Close<\/p>\n

Close-up of barnacles on a beached minke whale.<\/p>\n

Image credit: Imagarium\/Shutterstock.com<\/p>\n

Comprising over 2,000 different species, their defining feature is their hard calcareous shells that often appear like a ridged dome. Inside the shell, they look like tiny, feathery-legged creatures, with jointed appendages called cirri that they use to sweep plankton and detritus from the water into their mouths.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unlike most crustaceans, barnacles are sessile, permanently attaching themselves to fixed structures, like rocks, ship hulls, or \u2013 of course \u2013 whales. Barnacles also colonize other marine creatures, most notably the shells of sea turtles, which offer an ideal surface to settle upon. They\u2019ve even been spotted on sharks and dolphins, though less frequently.<\/p>\n

Do barnacles hurt whales?<\/p>\n

No, barnacles do not hurt whales. Fortunately, the barnacles are largely harmless and simply hitch a ride on their bodies.<\/p>\n

They are not parasitic, as they are not causing significant damage to the whale.<\/p>\n

Professor Geoffrey Boxshall<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir feeding biology is essentially the same as a typical acorn barnacle attached to a rock along the coast. The difference is that they attach to a \u2018moving rock\u2019 that transports them around so they have access to plentiful fresh supplies of plankton for feeding,\u201d commented Boxshall. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are not parasitic, as they are not causing significant damage to the whale,\u201d he continued.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, the same can’t be said for other marine creatures. Boxshall remarked: “Sharks occasionally carry barnacles, but these are\u00a0parasitic and take nutrients from the host.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some species of whale are more prone to barnacles than others. Gray whales are arguably most prone to infestation<\/a>, with some individuals carrying over 180 kilograms (400 pounds) of barnacles and whale lice each.<\/p>\n

Blue whales and orca (which are technically dolphins) scarcely have any barnacles, most likely because of their rubbery, slick skin. It\u2019s also known that killer whales groom each other<\/a> with branches of sea kelp, which might ease the problem of skin-latching critters.<\/p>\n

\u201cBarnacle loads do vary between different host species \u2013 almost certainly driven by differences in host behaviour: feeding preferences, geographical distributions, depth distributions, migration timing, etc,\u201d concluded Boxshall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Certain barnacles are species-specific, meaning they evolved alongside a particular species of whale and never stray from the plan. For instance, Tubicinella major lives almost exclusively on right whales, while Coronula diadema pretty much only settles for humpbacks. There are also species that are closely associated with sea turtles and even sharks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s likely that the relationship between whales and barnacles goes back millions upon millions of years. It\u2019s impossible to know without hard evidence, but it\u2019s easy to imagine that this convenient alliance emerged not too soon after the first whales<\/a> ventured back into the oceans 50 million years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Why do so many barnacles end up hitching a ride on whales? Speaking to IFLScience, Professor Geoffrey Boxshall,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-311634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}