AUDIO:

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MIDGE MARTIN:

It's the sound we love to hear. Yes, it's the sound of Humboldt Bay Watch, and that subtle mouse click that lets you know it's time for us to talk about all the great things that are swimming around, walking around and being here in Humboldt County. Now I've got Michelle on the line today, and I also really quick want to say a big thanks to Kokatat. They sponsored this and they make all of the gear that you need to get into the water. Hey Michelle, how's it going?

MICHELLE KUNST:

Hey, Midge, it is going good. How are you doing?

MARTIN:

Good. You know what? Today is the first day, uh, that I didn't ask you that while we were on the phone because I know that I'm going to ask you that in just a minute. So I was like, you know what? It may seem rude, but this will pay off because I get to genuinely ask how you're doing for the first time.

KUNST:

Yeah, it's always a funny little like introductory conversation before.

MARTIN:

And then you do it all over again. So I thought, you know what, let's just mix it and do it live so glad to hear that you're doing okay even though it's a little bit foggy and cloudy out today, but overall pretty nice. I would say this is fall weather. I'm into fall weather.

KUNST:

It is, it truly is truly fall. It feels like it nowadays.

MARTIN:

Yeah, especially with the sun going down so early. I'm not quite used to that yet. Um, but the seasons change. What are you going to do?

KUNST:

They do. They do and they change for the better. Sometimes it's great to have like the fall migration of birds coming through fall migration of whales coming through. There's always new things each season so well.

MARTIN:

And speaking of whales coming through on migration, so we all know about the whales, but they've got some little critters that you are going to be talking about today.

KUNST:

Right. Yes. Yes. So I think it must have been sometime last spring that we talked about the whales migrating northwards towards Alaska um with their babies. And so now that it's fall time, they're kind of doing the opposite, they're making their way south again. Um, you know, particularly the gray whales heading down to the warmer waters off the coast of Mexico. Um, but I actually recently saw, I believe it was humpback whales off the coast of Trinidad. And it got me just thinking about the whales again and how they're passing by. Um and then I saw a an instagram post actually by the Noyo science center, which is based in Mendocino. They got me really excited about this, another just like weird and wonderful creature that lives on whales, um, which are called whale lice. I think way back in the spring, I mentioned that there's this species of barnacles that live on whales and they didn't really know that much about lice. Um, they're not technically lice actually, they are crustaceans. Um, so they're related to crabs and actually more closely related to skeleton shrimp. Um But yes, and they're actually not parasites. Some sometimes they're referred to as parasites, but there's kind of some debate as to whether they're actually causing real harm or not. A lot of folks refer to them as commence cell, meaning that both the whale and the species of whale lice are benefiting in some ways from living, commence only with each other.

MARTIN:

So these not not super adorable creatures, I'm gonna be honest.

KUNST:

Not exactly, it's true. They're a little gross.

MARTIN:

Yeah, a little bit of nightmare fodder. What, what are they doing?

KUNST:

Yeah, so they they are kind of like they have pretty flat bodies so that they can attach themselves to the whales and kind of be streamlined and then they have the legs, you know, like a crab or shrimp, wood. And then instead of having claws, they have hooks at the at the ends of their legs so that they can hook onto the whales so that as the whales are moving around swimming around um they can kind of stay fast in there And they're pretty small. They, you know, there's there's a bunch of different species, like over like 20-30 different species but and they range in price, but they're up to like one inch that's kind of like the big, the biggest end of them but many are um much smaller and so they're latched onto the whale, they never ever leave the whale. So they don't have any kind of free swimming stage, like many invertebrates and other crustaceans in the ocean have um there's no like larval stage in which they're, they're plank tonic and, and floating around the currents rather they live their entire lives on whales and sometimes they'll transfer from whale to whale, but they're just living on the whale and what they're doing is living their life. They're eating, they're reproducing. Um and so they're eating, they're living in the like kind of just like protected parts of the whale's body. So um, you know, maybe like in the, like in baleen whales, you know how they have, um they can open up their mouths really wide and they have this pouch that kind of extends out and it's almost just like corrugated pattern of grooves. So um sometimes the lice will live in those grooves. Sometimes they'll live in the blow holes. Sometimes they'll live in like around the eyes or the mouth or the nose and oftentimes even in like um wounds or scars anywhere where there's like a little bit of extra protection. They'll be living there. And um and actually in different species, different species of whales and other marine mammals have specific mental relationships with individual species of whale lice. So there's a kind of cool, interesting relationship going on there. But um as I said, they're eating. So some species will just munch on like algae that's growing accumulating on whales, but a lot of them also are just kind of feeding on like the dead tissue, dead flaking skin of a whale, especially like I said around wounds um to kind of gross, but you know, in a way like the whales have to kind of get rid of that, that dead skin anyhow, we all have to exfoliate. So the lights are kind of helping in that way. Um and then I said they're just they're just reproducing so they um just like any kind of animal, their their goal in lice is to, you know, extend their population within this kind of like micro ecosystem of an individual whale.

MARTIN:

So when you're talking about a commence cell, I think is what you're saying relationship. So am I right in thinking that commence a would be somewhere in between um a kind of like would it be symbiotic uh in between a parasitic and a symbiotic relationship where it's not necessarily harming the whale, but maybe it's not getting as much out of it, is that kind of where that lies.

KUNST:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So you know, and and I think there's like some debate here in different species, so you know have different relationships with their whale host, but I think in most cases the relationship is that the lights are um you know, they have a habitat on the whale, they are consuming food from the whale um and there may be like having a little bit of harm to the whale but not to the point where the whales going to like be so affected, you know, to the point where they will become sick or infected or even die. Um and then the whale is kind of getting a little bit of benefit of some like exfoliation maybe some cleaning off of that that like you know dead tissue. Um So in some ways like that almost sounds mutual is stick because both species is benefiting from that relationship, but I think it's just like not beneficial enough to be considered mutual ist IQ. Um because also like, you know, it is kind of like, I think that researchers know just by kind of observing well behavior that the lice living on the whales is kind of irritating. Like it's kinda itchy. They can feel them on them. They'll even, they even think that sometimes when especially humpbacks um like you know how they breach out of the water, They jump and then they land back down and crash into the water. They sometimes think that that behavior is to like kind of itch that scratch like maybe knock a couple of lice off. Then they've even seen whales kind of like dive underwater and kind of like rub around um on like rocks on the ocean floor to kind of like it's you know the barnacles and the lice that are living on their skin,

MARTIN:

right? Yeah because it does seem to be um a lot of them, these normally, I like to sit and look at photos, nope, not not doing that with these. So you said that they don't they don't have any time away. How do they then get, how does a whale get them if it doesn't, if they're not free floating? You know what I mean by that? Yeah,

KUNST:

yeah, totally. So, I mean, this relationship between whale lice and whales and other marine mammals to goes back probably like for the entire existence of whales on this Earth. Um and so I don't, you know, I don't I didn't really read about what the kind of beginning of that relationship could have looked like, but there is some really interesting research around um what like, whale lice can tell researchers about whale migration. So there's, you know, kind of interesting example of humpback whales have several distinct populations around the earth, um you know, around the Earth's ocean. And they kind of like stick to those populations and have their migration routes and uh researchers thought to take samples of lice whale lice off of those distinct populations and kind of like, um you know, like research there, look, look at their DNA sequences sequences. And they were expecting that the populations that have migration routes close to each other, like maybe in the same ocean or or adjacent to each other would have more similarities in their DNA sequence, but they actually found that that wasn't entirely true that there was some similarities in the whale lice on the whales and different migration routes, but it wasn't always that they were adjacent to each other. And so there's definitely a lot of kind of like interesting and unanswered questions around how those whale lice populations have shifted around the oceans via the whale's migration route. That makes sense. And so a whale can um, like a lice can kind of jump over to another whale if there's contact between the whales. So if they're either mating or fighting or you know, maybe like mother child relationship that that lice can move around. So that tells us that, you know, throughout millennia, whale populations on different migration routes do cross paths with the different populations of whales because there's similarities in the DNA sequences of the different whale lice.

MARTIN:

That's so interesting because um it almost gives you kind of a way to like look back in time a little bit. It's like an ancient tracker uh for whales in a way, right. It shows that at some point they were hanging out somewhere or they couldn't have done that.

KUNST:

Yeah, super interesting.

MARTIN:

So we definitely see like when whales wash up, you see barnacles and things like that, but I don't know that I've seen any lice on wheels. Is this all whales get these type of things.

KUNST:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that pretty much all whale species have some kind of species of whale lice that live on them and I, I am kind of actually never seen a washed up whale. I always try to go see them and for whatever reason it doesn't work out. But I bet you, if you were like looking for them, you would see them. And I think probably also when a whale washes up and it's out of the water, um those lives are gonna also slowly die because they also rely on water uh to live. So I bet you like, you know, if they're out of water for a couple of days, they might start to not look very crustacean like and maybe just like, you know, who knows what they look like. But they will often live among barnacles that are living on wheels too because it's another kind of um protected area where they can latch on.

MARTIN:

What an interesting little life cycle that these things have that they don't have any sort of movement on their own. Yet they attached to this thing that uh circumvents the globe often

KUNST:

totally, totally, it's, it's just a cool example of like really opposite scales of things. Like, you know, the whales are some of our biggest animals on earth. And these lights are just tiny, but they're traversing all of the earth's oceans. Um because they're just hitching a ride on the whales,

MARTIN:

which um, is actually a great segue. So I don't know if you found a um lice song, I was like really not not wanting to go that route and I was trying to think of like the positive things because that's what I like about when you come on Humboldt Bay watch is you always have something that's like small and interesting. That doesn't necessarily like um pull the, the warm fuzzies of your heartstrings necessarily, but the more like curious and interesting things. Um and then we kind of see the positive. But did you happen to find a song that is whale lice adjacent?

KUNST:

You know, I looked really hard. I didn't find any songs about lice and I didn't really want to look like too hard because I didn't really want to listen to a song about lice. I was looking at like crustaceans incrementalism. But I think what I, what I came back to was a song that I had requested when I spoke about whales in the spring. And the song is called whale song by Mountain Man. But I'm curious if you found any kind of other thematic songs related to whale lice?

MARTIN:

Well I did in um hitching a ride. You know the song? It's like kind of a famous little song. Um Yeah, so we'll play that one too. But you had whale song by Mountain Men by Mountain Man. Oh yeah, o Mountain Man is good. So that's a good one. So we'll play whale song, but I'm gonna do hitching a ride to simply because again, not a good looking animal but well traveled. I gotta say that's a whale, a whale traveled well traveled little animal.

KUNST:

They

MARTIN:

are real quick before I play your whale song. Is there anything cool coming up with like the Trinidad coastal Land Trust or any sort of benefit? Sometimes there's like a little wine sipper or a cool walk. Is there anything coming up in the near future?

KUNST:

Yeah, there is. Um, we have a cool volunteer work day coming up um, at a point also known as camel Rock along scenic drive, which is a great spot to look for whales. So I'd say if you come out on the first saturday of november, I believe it's november 5th, we'll be having a workday there in partnership with Samara Restoration. They're donating um, some native plants. It'll be a fun day of just kind of putting native plants in the ground and up there on, you know, the kind of the grassy area above camel rock. Um, so it'll be a great opportunity to look for whales going south.

MARTIN:

Right? I love, um, it seems like just yesterday they were going up north and then time goes so quickly. Uh, they're on their way back down. So that's November five at what time?

KUNST:

From 9:30 to noon. And um, it's helpful for us if you email us to let us know you're coming. So we know how much to prepare for. So you can email Zoe at Trinidad Coastal Land Trust dot org, and you can also find all that information on our website.