24.07.2024 – Friends of Friends

The bodies of Blainville’s Beaked Whales (Mesoplodon densirostris) and other large cetaceans often house certain types of barnacles. On tours like this morning, where we see Blainville’s so clearly we can count their crustacean cohorts, I often wonder about them. Whilst Barnacles do not have true eyes like us (instead they have photoreceptors), I wonder what they’ve seen. They’ve accompanied their unknowing hosts a long way. They’ve been to rich feeding grounds on continental slopes and participated in 1000-metre-deep dives to hunt squid in submarine canyons. They’ve seen close calls and desperate manoeuvres, outswum precadotry orca, socialised, played, and hopefully bred with others of the same species. They’ve touched the sea floor and breached above it. They’ve felt the heartbeat, the breath, and the blood of the whale, and yet they’re brief hitchhikers. They stay only with the whales for a year or so before they pass on. Quietly slipping unacounced off the whales back, making their last journey down down into the deep, wide blue. Where they and their former homes will have gone so many times before. Do they know? That as they close their filter feeding cirri, their photoreceptors darken, and their their calcium carbonate skeletons prepare to cycle into crab shells. That they have learnt more of this species than we ever will, and yet they will never tell us.

By Peter Worth

Sightings of the Day

Ribeira Brava

09:30 Rough Toothed Dolphins, Risso’s Dolphins, Blainville’s Beaked Whales

13:30 Bottlenose Dolphins, Rough Toothed Dolphins, Atlantic Spotted Dolphins

17:00 Bottlenose dolphins, Rough-toothed dolphins

Stenella

09:30 Rough Toothed Dolphins, Risso’s Dolphins, Blainville’s Beaked Whales

14:00 Bottlenose Dolphins, Rough Toothed Dolphins, Atlantic Spotted Dolphins

17:00 Bottlenose Dolphin, Rough Toothed Dolphin, Loggerhead sea turtle