Biagini, owner of Gone Whale Watching San Diego, was on a filming expedition 18 miles southwest of San Diego with Taylor Parent when the male humpback whale, nicknamed Snowflake, approached the boat.

Barnacles usually grow on the whale's head, which can serve as a helmet of sorts when the whale is fighting with other whales ...

BARNACLE BIOGRAPHY The barnacles that latch on to baleen whales, such as this humpback, may offer a record of their hosts’ movements, even millions of years later, new research suggests. Gregory ...

Read more The post How Barnacles Hitchhike on Whales and Change Marine Ecosystems Without Moving appeared first on discoverwildscience. Imagine clinging to a moving mountain, ...

Whale barnacles contain clues to migratory paths. Tagging and monitoring whales can reveal their extensive migration routes, but not how far—or whether—their ancestors roamed five million ...

Whale barnacles attach to a humpback whale’s skin (Aleria Jensen, NOAA/NMFS/AKFSC) Specifically, the Pacific coast of Panama appears to have served as a whale meeting point for at least 270,000 ...

Paper in PNAS; Whales and their hitch-hiking barnacle companions. Barnacles are best known as sessile creatures that stick to rocks or perhaps ships. But some species of barnacles glue themselves ...

Whales can remove some dead skin and barnacles through surface activity such as breaching, according to Meynecke, but sand rolling also plays an integral role – especially in removing barnacles.

They have thousands of barnacles on them, picking one off might be cool for you, but if you have a whole boatload of people trying to pick barnacles off whales, it can just get dangerous," she added.

Starr said in the post the whale was covered with barnacles. "It is believed that adult Humpback whales can have up to a 450kg of them on their bodies—that's a lot of free riders!