11/24/2017
They encourage us to buy various brushes, cleansers and different cosmetic products to refresh our skin every now and then. But did you know that whales have an exfoliation ritual which maintains their skin and keeps it fresh? Moreover, these majestic sea giants have realized how to do it for free.
Google 'smooth skin' and you'll find over 170 million results with articles about how to exfoliate and products and tools to buy to slough off dead skin. But it's not just humans that exfoliate, researcher Sarah Fortune discovered that bowhead whales in Cumberland Sound, Canada, use a cluster of large ...
It was an innocent invasion of privacy when Canadian researchers stumbled upon an exclusive retreat for whales — and caught some bowheads that, they determined, were exfoliating their skin in the waters off Nunavut. The discovery, described in a study published Thursday in the journal Plos One, ...
For close to two centuries, bowhead whales have been observed rubbing against large boulders in the summer, but it wasn't exactly clear why. Thanks to a new study, it can now be confirmed that this is the whales' way of exfoliating, or getting rid of skin that may be dead or damaged from exposure to ...
Aerial drone footage of bowhead whales in Canada's Arctic has revealed that the large mammals molt and use rocks to rub off dead skin. The footage provides one answer to the mystery of why whales return to Cumberland Sound, Nunavut, every summer, and helps explain some unusual behavior that ...
11/23/2017
In August 2014, marine ecologist Sarah Fortune was trying to tag bowhead whales with transmitters so she could study their feeding habits in ...
Marine biologists from the University of British Columbia happened to be in the region filming the whales with an aerial drone. They had come to find out more about their hunting but, for a paper in the journal Plos One, they wrote that instead they saw unusual swimming patterns. “This was an incidental ...
As a good dermatologist will tell you, proper exfoliation can be a crucial part of any skincare routine. There are innumerable brushes, cleansers and other tools that promise to sweep away dead cells, leaving skin softer and silkier. Humans pay through the nose for it, too. Bowhead whales, on the other ...
Arctic bowhead whales travel to warm water fiords in order to give themselves exfoliating treatments, drone footage has revealed. Skin-shedding is common among whales, dolphins and porpoises, but doubt has existed about whether this is true of Arctic species such as beluga, narwhal and bowhead ...
One of the reasons why the bowhead whales make their way to Cumberland Sound, Nunavut, during the summer is now cleared up, and it's thanks in part to drones. From the look of things, these marine mammals have chosen the Canadian Arctic as their go-to place to remove their molted dead skin or, ...
As oceans change, relatively large-bodied, fatty Arctic crustaceans known as zooplankton ¾ the preferred prey of bowhead whales ¾ could move to new habitats further north while smaller-bodied, temperate species that are lower in energy are likely to dominate the waters. Scientists don't know how ...
11/22/2017
Off the coast of northern Canada, on the very edge of the Arctic Circle, there is a bay where whales gather. Each summer bowhead whales come here ...
Just like we use pumice stones to scrape dead skin off cracked heels during pedicures, bowhead whales may be using boulders at the bottom of the ...
Most whales, dolphins and porpoises are thought to shed and replace their skin continuously. However, this may not be true of Arctic species — including beluga whales, narwhal and bowhead whales — that seasonally occupy warmer waters such as estuaries and fiords. Beluga whales and likely ...
Fortune was watching the whales' behaviour from a boat. She was with colleagues, including William Koski, a whale biologist with LGL Limited, and ...
For a bowhead whale stretching up to 20 meters long and weighing as much as 75 tonnes in Canada's Arctic, the question is what to do about it.
Whales travel to the Canadian Arctic each year for a spot of exfoliation, reveals new research. The study shows that bowhead whales molt and rub on ...
Drone footage captures Bowhead whale in the Cumberland sound in Nunavut. Using the drone, researchers learned that the bowhead whale moults ...
In August 2014, Sarah Fortune was trying to tag bowhead whales with transmitters so she could study their feeding habits in Canada's Cumberland ...
IMAGE: Example of an animal with nearly no sloughing skin (i.e., proportion of body with sloughing skin = <33%) (A) and another bowhead whale with ...
When you're 60 feet (18m) long and have flippers rather than hands, it can be hard to scratch an itch. But bowhead whales have solved the problem ...
Example of an animal with nearly no sloughing skin (i.e., proportion of body with sloughing skin = <33%) (A) and another bowhead whale with a high ...
Then, she saw a group of eight bowhead whales rubbing their bodies against the large boulders. Using aerial drones to watch the whales, she saw ...
They may be over ten times larger than the average human, but it seems that bowhead whales love to be pampered just as much as we do.