Rare footage Ccaptures sucker fish 'surfing' humpback whales off Australia's coast

Watch Rare footage Ccaptures sucker fish 'surfing' humpback whales off Australia's coast - New York Post on Dailymotion

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00:00we obviously were interested in the whales behavior but what we found is that you know

00:20in certain positions where we deploy the tags these suckerfish seem to photobomb our video

00:27material quite frequently and they were hanging out at the same spot and and so over time of course

00:35we raised that question maybe you know there is certain space like certain places on the whale

00:41that are more beneficial for those remoras to spend their time because there's less resistance

00:46and they know how to how to utilize the whale's body in in a in the best way possible to reduce

00:53any kind of drag on them and the other thing that we noticed is whenever the whale was breaching and

00:59doing in particular fast movements it appears that the suckerfish were responding very quickly to the

01:06movements and they knew exactly when to let go of the body of the whale before it was breaching the

01:12surface of the water and then

01:14whales um and they're like an upside down fish it's very bizarre um appearance so if you look at them

01:35at first they don't really make sense because they look upside down and they are actually upside down

01:41so they kind of turn their gills into these um suction cup plates and the benefit for them is that

01:48well they don't actually have to invest much time into swimming and and energy into swimming around

01:54and if they are living on the whale they're actually getting their meals from the whales delivered so

02:01they can feed on the crustaceans little sea lice that grow on the on the whale skin but as it appears they

02:08can also eat the whale skin so they have their entire meal and they all have their mates with them as

02:13well so they are mating and and reproducing on the whale's body so it's like the perfect vehicle for

02:21them they're also actively breaching so we've had individuals with high number of these remoras and

02:40they were continuously breaching um and there were no other whales that they were communicating with it

02:46it was at the early start of the season so it appeared that they're trying to just you know

02:50get rid of some of these remoras and they were checking whether they had less after they breached so

02:56so i suspect that the majority would probably leave at some point maybe in temperate waters but then

03:17where do they go um you know do they find other species that they can then um use as a host

03:24and wait until the humpback whales to come back we don't know but