The Gray Whale, Part 2

Published Mar 7, 2023, 8:24 PM

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. 

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 I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series on gray whales, inspired by a first end encounter that Rob had recently, Right, that's right. Yeah. I go into detail a bit more about this in the first episode, but basically, the family and I got to go down to Baja California, Mexico to see gray whales in their their breeding lagoons and it was it was magical. We got to observe them in their their their most peaceful setting. Um and uh. And so we're gonna we're gonna talk a little bit about about that setting today, but also their their cycle while they go through why they go through these migration cycles and so forth. Yeah, So if you haven't heard part one, you should probably go back check that one out first. In that we explored the basics of gray whales, describe some of their their major characteristics, but we also talked about things like their relationship with barnacles. They have some obligate barnacles that they are usually encrusted with. Today we're going to focus some more on gray whale ecology, such as how they fit into their environment, especially with regard to predators. That's right, especially they're they're really their primary predator, their main predator, and that is the orca, the killer whale, I guess, their main predator other than humans. Yes, aside from humans, and of course there have been fluctuations in the risk posed by by humans to gray whales. It certainly hasn't gone away. Our risk to gray whales go beyond merely whaling them. It also applies to other things we're doing to the environment. But yes, aside from us, it's the orca that is the main I mean, it's really the orc of that is, that is the threat posed to gray whales that have helped shape what the gray whale is. It's really difficult. It seems to overstress the importance of this predator's role in the life cycle of this whale in particular, but multiple whale species. So we've discussed the orc on the show before, I believe if they've come up, although I don't think we've ever really done a deep dive on them. They are an apex predator, They're an oceanic dolphin, and their range is nothing short of the world's oceans. If you look at maps depicting where killer whales can be found, and it's basically like, well, is the ocean there, well, then that's their range. Though that coverage has also been described as a bit patchy. It doesn't mean like the oceans just packed with them. And their conservation status is technically dated deficient, so you know, there's still some unknowns about about their their their cycles, and their whereabouts. But the orca itself has no natural predators. It is the absolute top of the food chain. Now. The orca has long been creatures of reverence for many indigenous populations, especially those populations with ties to the sea, and many of these understandings have a more i would say, based on what I've been reading, more nuanced visions of the orcas and understandings of the orca compared to Western depictions that up until very recent times, depictions and understandings of killer whale, we're very much focusing in on their their savagery and also greatly exaggerating their potential threat to humans because we'll touch on this later, but there have been no documented cases of a killer whale in the wild killing a human being, though there have been quite a few cases in captivity, right, Yeah, and uh, and that's that's, of course a sad story in and of itself. Were probably not going to go into that much, but I did a fair amount of reading about that over the weekend as well. I watched the trailer for Blackfish, and it made just the trailer alone was a bit too much for me. I'm gonna have to build up my courage to actually watch a Blackfish, which is a documentary about captive orcas and some of the very tragic events and deaths that have surrounded that practice. But long before that was taking place, you had people like plenty of the elder, our old friend plenty of the elder chiming in on Orca. He describes them in detail in one chapter of the Natural History, stating that their form quote cannot be in any way adequately described, but as an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth. You could say that about almost any mammal. Yeah, I don't. It's a it's a strange description. I mean, we're we're fortunate, I guess, and that we we have so many wonderful photographs, so much great footage of Orca, and in many cases as well, a lot of people get to glimpse them in the wild. Uh, you know, from from a distance usually, I guess, but um. But still we have a better idea of like what a killer whale is, and we don't have to just think, well, I know there was flesh and I know there were teeth. I mean that image conjures to mind just like uh, one of those tumors that grows teeth. But it's just like floating in the ocean. Yeah, it sounds like some sort of science fiction monster. Um. But at the same time, this this chapter is definitely worth checking out for plenty fans because he goes into a little bit of detail though about their their hostility toward the palana towards the whales. And this, of course is very true or at least of of some varieties of work in one variety in particular that we're going to discuss, and it's actually reflected in the name killer whale, which the author and naturalist Mark Carwardine in his book A Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises of the World. He points out that moniker killer whale is derived from whale killer. Now The species name for the orca is Orcanus orca, and this is an interesting assembly as well, with the ancient Roman use of orcanus meaning belonging to the kingdom of the dead, and orca meaning either a kind of whale or a barrel. In the Greek, I've seen it also translated as like barrel whale. So orca may be the only true natural predator of the gray whale, though large sharks like gray white sharks have been known to attack calves and even adults. And then you have things like the cookie cutter shark. That makes a small shark species that may take bites out of adults. But these are you know, I think you might think of these more as nuisances than like true predators. Though maybe I'm not being fair to the cookie cutter sharks. I mean they are taking bites out of If something was taking a bite out of me, I would consider it probably a predator. Depends how big the bite is. As the name implies, they're small bites and and they're smaller I guess the bigger you are. But anyway, yeah, the orca are the very to say the least, a hell of a predator to have to deal with they are. They are ruthless and cunning. Their employ various pack hunting or I guess you might call it called pod hunting attack strategies against their prey, and the list of possible prey for a killer whale is pretty long. Um, They've been observed to prey on great white sharks and the waters off the coast of South Africa and New Zealand, strategically targeting and removing the livers of these great whites, like tucking into them right behind the pectoral find and like removing the liver and then eating the liver from the great white. But when it comes to orcas and their diets, it gets intriguingly complicated. So orcas, as Carbadine describes, quote, have a bewildering array of ecologically distinct forms called ecotypes. And while they they're generally considered to be all of the same species again Orcanus Orca, you might think of them as genetically distinct orca cultures. This makes sense given all of the different things I was reading about sort of uh, subgroups of orcas specializing in different types of prey, like, for example, while the orcas are one of the main predators of gray whales. Not all orcas would show any interest in a gray whale. That's right, um. And it gets even crazy when you look at again genetically distinct orca groups, these these ecotypes and then each they You may have two different ecotypes inhabiting the same waters, but they don't associate with each other. Each each ecotype has its own behaviors, its own diet, its own social structure, its own vocal signatures, its own distribution patterns. So it gets really fascinating look at all the different examples. And I'm not going to go into all the different ecotypes here, but of note, for our discussion of the North Pacific, there are two distinct ecotypes to consider. There's the resident or fish eating killer whale, and then there's Biggs killer whale also known as transient killer whales. But I think Bigg's killer whale is the prefer tile. Okay, So I'd imagine it's some of those resident or fish eating killer whales that you know, gray whales might go right by them and they're not going to mess with them. They're not going to be interested. Yeah. As the name implies, members of the fish eating ecotype eat mostly fish and they usually ignore marine mammals, biggs killer whales though, yeah, these are the true whale killers, and it's fascinating. They live in smaller groups, usually just two to six. The groupings for other varieties of like fish eating orca tend to be larger. They're seemingly the biggs whales carbating rights are not interested in eating fish at all, though, I have to say in his book there is a photo of one that's labeled as a is a big skiller whale that's playing with a salmon in its mouth. So I don't know. Maybe it's just playing with the salmon, maybe it's eating it a little bit. I don't know. Part of being such an intelligent apex predator is killer whales have been observed to play with their food a bit. The big skiller whale occasionally kill birds, but yes, as the description implies, they mostly hunt whales, pinnipeds, and sea otters. Now they are transient, they are kind of erratic, apparently in their movements. I couldn't help but think of this kind of like this roving band of bikers. Though I'm over anthromorphizing here. And it's also worth noting that one of the reasons that biggs is preferred over the name transient is because apparently transient can be a little misleading, so that their movements are erratic, but they do follow the movements of their prey species, so they're not just They're not just completely random. There. I guess we might compare them to the bankers in um what is it point break the mass bankrappers in the surfing movie. They're kind of like maks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, they're they may seem chaotic, but they have they have a code, and there there are certain patterns they're following. Now, I mentioned the genetic differences, carbon in mentions that the Biggs orcas are actually the most genetically divergent out of all these ecotypes, and there are actually strong arguments to be made for speciation. Here, he writes that DNA evidence has shown that Biggs killer whales began diverging some seven hundred thousand to seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago, So again the orca. It seems difficult to overstress how important a role they play in the shape of modern whales, the way that these whales have survived, because one of the things you have to survive in the world, as as a whale, or basically any organism that's to be in the same waters as the killer whale, you have to be able to survive the killer whale. And it's a heck of a thing to have to survive because I just kept thinking reading about them that it's like they seem like the absolute perfect oceanic predator. You know, like they're they're they're robust, they're fast, they're intelligent, they're they're social. Um, you know, you can you can compare them in some ways to something like a great white shark. But great white sharks are for the most part solitary, like they don't work together. They lack the uh the intellect of of of of of an orca. Uh. The orcas are just and then the orcas are also not not to say that sharks are set in their ways, but but like the orca have shown that they have a have a real resiliency that they can they can change, they can alter uh there, uh you know whatever have if they're changes in available food sources, they may shift in what they're eating, that sort of thing. And so for just a few examples of how this has affected the shape of modern whales, I was reading now their book Whales their biology and behavior by Hammond at all, and apparently their their threat factors into the audible world of the marine environment. So fish eating orca produce loud clicks that in many cases their prey can't hear. This is certainly seems to be the case with salmon, for example, and they use these clicks for echolocation. But the bigs killer whale while they're they're feeding mostly or exclusively on mammals that are acoustically sensitive, and so big killer whales are quieter, and they use what they referred to in this book as a cryptic echolocation strategy that employs fewer clicks and irregular timing of said clicks. Oh so it's harder to detect that you are being clicked at right right, And the threat of the big killer whales is led to led various whale species to adopt the use of narrow band, high frequency clicks that orcas can't hear, So pygmy sperm whales, for example, this though they sacrifice signal range for stealth by making this change. Other whales, like beat whales, only use their echolocation at great depths below where the orcas hunt and there are also various anti anti predator strategies that various whales use. I think we'll end up discussing these in a bit. But basically, like the orca posts such a threat, and such a complex and intelligent threat, like every whale species on the menu has had to adapt to that threat and come up with tactics for survival. Yes, though, I think, as we mentioned in the last episode, one thing that's very important to stress is that for most whale species we're talking about, there might be some a couple of exceptions, such as like maybe some of the Minka whales, but for most billen whale species, it is really only the young that are directly threatened by orcas. Orca's rarely try i to prey on healthy adults, and even even more rarely succeed and preying on healthy adults, right, I mean, you will find some accounts. I think there was a real I was just reading this before we came in here there was an account of what seemed to be a pack of work as attacking an adult blue whale. But yes, for the most part, this goes for I mean most predators species. What are predators going after? They going after the hardest thing possible to kill. Uh No, there's a there, there's a you know, the various economic factors that have to be taken into account. They want to go after the easiest thing to get that will give them that that that nutrient payoff. And in the case of whales, the other calves are the best bet. They're smaller, they're weaker. If they can separate them, if they can get to them, if they have if they can tip the scales in their favor, then that's what they're going to go for. A paper that I'm going to talk about in a minute cites an older bit of research from Rice and Woolman published in the year nineteen seventy one, that included a survey of the bodies of three hundred and sixteen gray whales that I think we're off the coast of California, and it found that of those whales, eighteen percent had scars from previous orca attacks. And these would have been orca attacks. I guess that the whales survived. That doesn't necessarily tell you how many whales did not survive orca attacks. Oh, that's this interesting. Carwodine writes that possibly every single gray whale alive has possibly been I think the way where it was in the mouth of a killer whale at one point or another. And certainly you see you see a lot of these rake like scars left by orca teeth on their bodies. They're apparently attacked by the orca at a greater rate and any other whale species and as far as the young go. According to Carveden, orca quote probably take up to thirty five percent of the gray whale calf population annually and most of those attacks, it is believed, occur on the migratory corridor. And we'll talk more about gray whale migrations in a little bit or possibly in the next episode if the series goes to three parts. But yeah, there's like a migratory corridor for the eastern Pacific gray whale where they go back and forth between their northern feeding grounds up in the Arctic regions in the summertime, and then in the colder months they go south to areas like Baja California where they have their breeding grounds, their calving grounds and these lagoons, and it's during the travel back and forth that a lot of these attacks are going to occur, that's right, Yeah, well, we'll get into the specifics of that in a bit, but it but again, the orcas are cunning and they are going to choose the egg zach right time, in the exact right place to attack these these rather large prey animals. But you know, briefly, you know again, why is this migration taking place. What's because when you have a threat like the orca as a mother whale, you can't just give birth anywhere. You have to go where the orcas cannot go or won't go. And that's where these, uh, these lagoons come into play. Um like the Ojo de Labre lagoon that I went to in Um near Guerrero Negro, in Um in Baja California, Mexico, place that is shallow, too shallow to favor certain killer whale hunting strategies, but also not so shallow that the whales themselves cannot move around in the waters. Now that being said, Um, I happened across a paper this came out just last year in October, and this was the title of this paper was new Peril for gray Whale survival question mark predatory orca is spotted in Baja Calvin Lagoon. It's a situation where observers there had not seen orcas venturing into the lagoon, but then there was a spotting of them, and it's it doesn't sound like much came of this. It doesn't seem like there was any real follow up coverage that would indicate that the orcas came back and say, killed a bunch of calves or anything. I guess it was maybe more like a scouting mission, like maybe the orcas come in they kind of realize, Okay, well, these this is not optimal for hunting, even though the things we want to eat are here, and then they move around and go back. But anyway, in this paper that the author speaks with Stephen Schwartz, a primary researcher with the Lagunas send Ignacio Ecosystem Science project down there, and the way he describes that is, okay, you have the orca is. They're engaging in this. They engage in this kind of pack hunting behavior, but it's not two dimensional. It's three dimensional. Especially when they're going up against dangerous prey like the gray whale, something that can con pably kill them with a single blow of its tail. They need to be able to employ all of their strategies. They need to be able to you know, come at it from below, from the sides, etc. And we'll get into some of their tactics here in a bit, but basically they can't do that in the lagoon environment, right, and as surface dwelling animals, where it's not intuitive for us to think about physical conflict in this way. Really, you know, we're usually thinking about physical conflicts taking place with something on the same level as us on a plane, but in this case, it would be something more like you know, a space fight in like a Star Wars movie where there's you know, there is multidirectional attack exactly. Yeah. So again, the orcas are cunning, they're intelligent. They realize that this is not the battlefield where they will have the advantage, and they know that if they they waited out, there will come a time when the battlefield does tip to their advantage. Now, one thing we always try to do, at least when we remember is, you know, it's like when you're approaching the subject of predator prey conflicts from the origin point of the prey animal. Like we we started off talking about gray whales and then now we're talking about orcas that can tend to kind of make you want to, even if you normally have have some protections against this, to unconsciously vilify the predator animal. Uh, you know, think like, oh, the orcas are so bad because they're attacking the gray whales we've been thinking about but of course, you know, we all that the orcas are are beautiful, wonderful animals in their own way, and they're also just trying to survive. That this is just what their ecological niche is their predators. Yeah, that's right. We can't think to think of it as as the heroes versus villains and all of this, though I know it's it's very tempting to do so, and I found myself sort of fighting off that feeling, especially when when observing the gray whales. But even in that that paper, that Los Angeles Times paper, an I want to credit the author on that. Suzanne rust is the author. In speaking with the Swarts like sports basically, you know, it says like, look, you know, this is just this is how it is. Uh, you know, we're we're not just looking out for the great whales here, We're also looking out for the orca like they're they're It's part of the natural cycle of things here. So we shouldn't Yeah, we shouldn't fall into that line of thinking where oh no, the the the the orca orcas or the enemy, and the gray whales are are the only heroes of the ecology story going on before us. That being said, let's get into some of the dastardly ways the orcas attack gray whales and other whale species. Not dastardly except in the sense that every organism is, I guess, dastardly, and it's in its quest for survival. But they're they're solving problems. They're solving problems. Okay, So I wanted to return to a paper that I brought up with a more narrow focus in the previous episode, and it was a paper called Fight or Flight Anti Predator Stress Rategies of Baleen Whales, published in The Mammal Review in the year two thousand and eight by John kb Ford and Randall are Reeves. Now, you might remember in the last episode the context was I was consulting this paper to explore whether the barnacle incrustations on gray whales should be thought of purely as either a parasitic type of infestation, where it's harming the whale, or as a commensal infestation where you know, the barnacles getting something out of it. It has a substrate that brings it water flowing over it so it can filter feed and it gets protection from predators, but the whale is not really affected one way or another. That would be a commensal relationship or and this was the hypothesis put forward in this paper, there is actually a mutual benefit to the whales that are encrusted with barnacles because the thinking goes these incrustations with their you know, hard calcium carbonate plates actually serve as a kind of weapon or armor on the outside of the whale when it is attacked by orcas. And there's some evidence for thinking of it that way, but it's not certain, right, And I think you mentioned too that like one possibility is well a predator might think twice about biting part of a whale that's encrusted with these hard barnacles, or it might injure itself doing so. Right, So the quick additional work effect. There's one variety that excels in attacking sharks. And one of the ways that apparently this uh this ecotype is often identified is that they'll it's it's rougher food to have to depend on, and they'll often grind their teeth down, like basically to the gum line. O time. Yeah sou. So they're not about some of the killer killer whales in general not above trading off dental health for a sustaining meal if they have to. I'm gonna be thinking about that all day. Just just kind of gummy mouth whales. But anyway, I wanted to come back to this paper to more broadly explore some of the ideas it puts forward about the ways that whales, like gray whales, that billen whales have had their bodies and behavior shaped by predator pressures, a specifically pressure from orcas. And this paper was exploring the different types of survival strategies for different species of billen whales wind confronted with orcas, and the authors proposed grouping them basically into two main classes. One class of whales were the ones with flight strategies and the others were fight strategies. The flight strategy is mainly practiced by whales in the baling Optera genus, so this would include the common minca whale, the Antarctic minca the brutus whale that's spelled it looks like brye ryde, but I think it's pronounced bruta, the say whale, the fin whale, and the blue whale. And with all these strategies, their reaction to pod of orcas is basically just speedy retreat. They make a bee line out there. The direction doesn't really seem to have any consistent relationship to the shoreline. They just make a bee line away at top speed, usually speeds between twenty and forty kilometers an hour. And these are speeds that orcas I believe can typically match, but only for a short time. They usually can't or won't keep up with this speed for a long time, so they just fall back and don't catch them and a lot and we'll get into this, but a lot of their tactics often revolve around sustained attacks. Yeah. However, with these flight species, they can usually get away because they just swim fast and they get out of there and the orcas don't keep up the chase. But an interesting thing is that the all these flight species they just named, if they are overtaken by orcas, they usually are not able to put up much resistance at all. And they just sort of like submit to death. That might be overstating it, but they do not really have much close fighting capacity. On the other hand, you've got the fight strategy. And this has been observed in other billen whales such as the Southern right whale, the North Atlantic right whale, the bowhead, the humpback, and the gray whale, the ones we're focusing on in this series. And they say the authors here also say that the North Pacific right whale probably fits in this group too, but there haven't been enough documented cases of their encounters with orcas to say for sure. But the fight group encompasses a more diverse set of tactics, basically everything except for high speed one directional swimming away. So what do the fight strategies include? One, Rob, I think you alluded to this a little bit earlier, but we can get in more detail now. One is group formations. When in sufficient numbers, some fight strategy whales respond to orca harassment by grouping together to form defensive formations, for example, by placing calves in the center of a sort of shape where they're encircled by adults. One example the authors give is something called the rosette which is a circular formation with the heads of the adults will make a sort of flower pedal shape and they will put their heads in the middle around the calf and then have their tail flukes pointing out, which if you have seen the mighty slap of a gray whales tail fluke, or not just gray whale, any of these, like a humpback's tail fluke, you can imagine why that might be threatening to an approaching orca. And an important thing to point out is that this type of thing, these group formations, are not only observed in the baleen whales we're talking about in this study. Some toothed whales, for example, sperm whales have been observed to do something similar when harassed by orcas. Of course, sperm whales are predators, but they tend to prey on things like, you know, squids and stuff, and their calves are also sometimes attacked by orcas. Yeah, I've seen this defensive formation that I guess we could kind of compare to like circling the wagons, but I've seen it referred to as the marguerite formation in sperm whales, and it's something that sadly, whalers would sometimes take advantage of they realize that if you had an injured whale, it would like basically draw in this defensive formation of additional whales which you could then also kill. Yeah, and this fact of some whales coming to the aid of other whales is interesting, Like it's kind of heartwarming. The author has mentioned southern right whales and humpbacks having been observed to join in with single whales or groups that are under attacked by orcas, almost to help provide group defense. Now, we alluded to this a minute ago with the tail flukes pointing out outward, but some of the fight strategies of these whales are just physical blows. Like baleen whales will sometimes lash out and strike at orcas, most often with either pectoral flippers or with the flukes with the tail. And the authors also say that quote right whales and humpback whales occasionally also lunge or swing their heads at attackers. So it seems like throughout this paper the humpbacks really seem like the fightiest of the fight whales, like they will really put up a fight. But all of these whales are are powerful and can can swing a fluke or a flipper. Yeah, it makes sense. I guess that the gray whales or maybe not engaging and head based combat so much because their heads are just generally smaller compared to something like a humpback whale's head. But they're certainly they certainly use the flippers and the flukes. In fact, one of the things in Baja California that the guides mentioned, they're like, do not, under any circumstances attempt to touch flippers or flukes, because those are the weapons of the whale. Um you know, the only thing you're touching, and if the whale is curious and permitting it, as you're touching basically the head region. Yes, and while all these fight whales can put up a fight like they can deliver a mighty smack with the tails or with the flippers, it seems consistent that the gray whales are thought of as some of the least inclined to deliver a blow in defense and instead practice some other interesting defensive strategies more often. Yes, this is fascinating, So let's get to what some of these other strategies are. The authors one of them is environmental refuge. The authors right that all of the fight strategy whales except perhaps humpbacks try to seek refuge in the physical environment for defense, and gray whales are singled out as the best example of this of refuge seeking. When threatened, they head for shallow waters. That's kind of interesting. If you don't read any further, you might really wonder why that would be. That would I would almost imagine like, oh, whale would wouldn't wall feel kind of cornered in shallow waters. But it turns out this is helpful for a number of reasons. One, shallow waters provide potential hiding places, such as in kelp beds like forests of seaweed, or in breaking surf, and in both of these cases, these are kind of like blinds for whales. It's a place where it's harder for orcas to locate and detect them. This also makes sense this distinction when you think about say, like the humpback whale is a whale that its range includes you know, far open waters. But again, as we've discussed with the gray whale, these are whales that generally don't stray too far from the shoreline from the edge of the continent, so like this is there they really have a home turf advantage here, Yes, and Another thing the authors point out is that the gray whales can make themselves even more invisible when hiding in shallow water through a breathing technique known as snorkeling, where essentially they expose as little of their body as possible above the surface to breathe. Basically only the blowholes are exposed. Now, why would this make them harder to find? The researchers suggest it may be because this is somehow a quieter way to breathe than their normal breathing movements and orca's hunt in part by sound. But this part is really important. In addition to providing hiding places like kelp forests and breaking surf, shallow water also protects gray whales by depriving orcas of room to stage their preferred attacks. So the predators in shallow water simply cannot maneuver the way they need to to do the attacks they want, and these attacks would include like ramming the calves to try to separate them from adults. Yeah, it's worth noting here that that orcas are certainly susceptible to beaching. Granted, there are of course famous examples of self beaching attacks by orcas against against creatures you know, just just on the shore. Though this, it's worth noting, seems to be a learned tactic and not an instinctual one. So it takes even these orca groups that practice self beaching as a hunting tactic, it takes them a long time to learn it and do it properly. Yes, and it seems, at least certainly for the kinds of orcas that prey on whales, the shallows are just not where they're comfortable that it is not where they have room to make the moves that they need to make, usually to get a calf away from its mother and kill it right right. So for this reason, the authors say that in fact, orca's usually abandon an attack if the prey is able to make it to the shallows. So the gray whale gets into the shallows. The orcas, it's not like they usually will keep trying and fail. They're not even going to follow them there. They just give up. Now. I think another point that we might want to remember is that it seems to me a retreat to the shallows is not without risks. You might think, well, why would that involve risks? But the authors here mentioned quote fight species that retreat into shallow water would need good maneuverability to negotiate obstacles and prevent accidental stranding. So I mean stranding is a real threat when you're a whale, and a whale that goes into the shallows to hide, I think that could be thought of as somewhat analogous, not completely, but somewhat analogous to a land animal trying to hide from our predator by going into the surf in the ocean, like there is a chance you get washed out and drown. Yeah, yeah, Now it does seem though the grays are quite good at navigating the shallows. That seems to be the case based on the materials we've been looking at here. But again just going back to my observation of them in Mexico, the lagoon was again reasonably shallow, you know, deep enough that the whales can maneuver easily in there and even move around at some rather intense beats when because there again there was the calving. There was there there mothers and babies, but there was also mating going on, and the mating gets a lot more frenzied. H they'll do this thing too, that's called, i think sometimes referred to as a freight training. I think it's the term where they're like just a group of whales will just start zooming through the water. And their speeds to me were quite impressive, but but still like this is a lagoon, the tides coming in and out. There were some fairly drastic changes um based on the tides. So yeah, it seemed to me like the grays really knew what they were doing. It makes sense again because the gray whales are a species of whale that don't ever really go too far from the shore and the grand scheme of things, and they're they're there. The way they feed is to go down to the bottom, so they're they're tied to kind of like the edges, the hard and soft edges of their oceanic environment. All right, So next thing we've talked about group formations, physical blows, environmental refuge. The next thing I want to mention is defensive maneuvers. So gray whales are less inclined to physically fight by striking with flukes or flippers, though they will certainly do that in cases when defending calves. They just do it less than other species such as like humpback whales. But the authors write quote Instead, they often roll at the surface so that their dorsal surface rather than their ventral surface, meaning the back instead of the belly, is exposed to attack from below. Killer whales often debilitate and kill baleen whales by ramming forcefully and repeatedly into the ventral sides of their prey. Thus, rolling upside down may protect the vulnerable underside from attack. And I've actually watched some documentary footage of exactly this and the next thing I'm about to mention happening when orcas are swimming up on a gray whale adult that she will just roll back and expose her belly up above the water and have her back down below. I guess the back is much more protected from these striking attacks by the orcas. Again, just pure observation on my part, but some of the whales that would come up to the boat would do this, They would roll onto their under their backs, And I didn't think about it at a time because at the time it's like they're kind of like big dogs. It's almost like they want me to scratch their belly in my arm. Again, we're like, you know, twenty feet long, maybe, but but yeah, like this is maybe they're kind of rehearsing behaviors as well. I don't know. This next thing is really interesting. This is something gray whale mothers apparently do when escorting calves. Not only do they roll over on their backs at the surface of the water to keep the more vulnerable ventral side or the belly up above the waterline, they will sometimes literally lift their calves out of the water up on their bellies, placing them out of reach of the orcas. So the orcas are trying to ram the calf and injure it and get it away from the mother, so the mother will flip her more protected back underneath and get the baby up on like above the water, on top of her. Fascinating. Yeah, this reminds me again like one of the behaviors you see from the babies eventually in the lagoon is that they'll start, when they're strong enough, they'll start breaching. They'll start kind of like jumping out of the water, not just sticking parts part of their head up, but actually like jumping most of the way out of the water, if not all the way out of the water. And it's thought that this may also be rehearsals for defensive maneuvers as the mother and calf eventually move out of this protected lagoon and into rather dangerous domains of the orcas, right, And so you can see how that could be that kind of maneuvering practice could be useful in both ways for these purely def inns of maneuvers, where like the calf is trying to get up on its mother's belly to get away, or for actual attacks if they're trying to slam down on the orca or something. Yeah, because these babies again, these are these are these are big babies. Now. One thing explored in this paper that caught my attention is the relationship between these different fight versus flight strategies and how that manifests as morphological differences differences in the body shapes of these different types of whales. So the authors write that flight whales the ones that just escape as fast as they can are you might not be surprised to learn more streamlined for fast movement with elongated forms, typically smaller flippers to reduce drag while swimming, and what they call high aspect ratio flukes, which they say this is a quote a measure of surface area relative to fluke length for propulsive efficiency and high speed. So you can look up pictures of this if you want. But these, these flight whales will tend to have just less chunky looking flukes, whereas the fight whales have kind of, i don't know, more rounded, thicker flukes that just have more surface area. Well, looking at this illustration you provide, it's like if you turn the fluke on its side and assume that it is a mustache, you're more the closer you are to a pencil thin mustache. Well, then yeah, that's going to be your flight your fight tho is going to be your bushear mustache. That that is a good comparison. Yeah, So flight whales are they're specializing for speed. Fight whales, on the other hand, are not specialized for speed but for maneuverability. And this is important to think about. So it's not necessarily so much for just being able to like hit and deliver a blow with the tail or the flipper, though that is part of it, especially for some of these species, but it's for maneuverability. And what does that mean. Essentially, it means being able to turn on a dime. The fight whales have larger and longer flippers and larger fluke surfaces relative to their body size. And what this allows them to do is turn quickly in tight spaces and change which direction they're facing, even if they don't have any forward momentum, so they can kind of like turn quickly at a near stand still. And I was trying to think about a good analogy here. It seems like the difference would be between like the turning movement capabilities of an airplane versus a helicopter. Your fight whales are going to be more like a helicopter and your flight whales are going to be more like an airplane. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's that's a solid comparison. Of course, being able to turn around quickly is a is a clear advantage if you are trying to defend yourself or especially to defend your young against against killer whales, because you need to be able to orient your body so that the more defensible part of it, or the threatening part of it is face the nearest killer whale quickly. And this also allows whales such as gray whales to do that like rolling at the surface. And again we might think like where does this give the whale the biggest advantage? Again, it comes down to shallower waters where they can turn on a dime, but the killer whales cannot employ their three D hunting tactics. I mean, I don't know how how far we should go with the helicopter versus airplane, but it's like it's one thing to imagine say fighter jet versus attack helicopter, just you know, out in the open sky, but now imagine that that imagine combat going down like in a city scape, in a tunnel or something. Yeah. I've got one last thing from this paper I want to add, which I think should give a little bit of emotional payoff to learning all this stuff about the anti predator strategies of whales. And that is the though, of course, you know, the both the predator and the prey animal. It's not like we begrudge either one. They both have a right to live and the predators do need to hunt in order to survive. But it turns out most of the time these anti predator strategies are successful, Like in most of these encounters between orcas and gray whales, the orcas are not successful in killing one of the whales, not just gray whales, but but all of the whales. I think talked about in this paper. It's just that the anti predator strategies are pretty effective. The flight whales they swim fast and they usually get away, and the fight whales are usually able to repel or avoid an orca attack. Yeah. Basically it's like, what whatever is necessary to price yourself out of being eaten? Can you make yourself just too costly of a prey target for the predator? Um? And uh and yeah, you just have to sort of cross that line. And also always thinking about this, it always reminds me of that part and Butch casting the Sundance Kit about you know, would you would you make that jump if you didn't have to m There's only so much that the predator is going to do because ultimately there are there are other whales in the sea. Yeah. All right, Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and close it up for this episode. We'll be back though in one final episode on gray whales and also essentially on orcas as well. Just a reminder that stuff to blow your mind. It is a science podcast with core episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays, we do listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays, we do a short form artifact or monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. I forgot the name mentioned the name of the of the Friday episodes huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Pauseway. 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. It's production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, This's the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

Stuff To Blow Your Mind

Deep in the back of your mind, you’ve always had the feeling that there’s something strange about re 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,718 clip(s)