Any dermatologist will tell you it’s very important to exfoliate to achieve desired smoothness and slough off dead skin. This isn’t only important for humans though. As Inquisitr reports, these Bowhead whales exfoliate too! Well, they molt.
This process happens in most whales but it’s usually in the winter and no whales facilitate the natural process like bowhead whales do in the summer. They travel to the Cumberland Sound in Canada to rub their backs against huge rocks and boulders. This process removes their dead skin or skin that’s been damaged by various environmental factors like parasites or the sun.
This process was discovered by marine ecologist, Sarah Fortune. She was studying the whales to see their feeding habits and found it interesting that they were going into this shallow water area where there weren’t many zooplankton, the main food group for these whales, reports National Geographic.
Fortune and her team took a drone to get a closer, more accurate look at these exfoliation parties!
“We saw clearly that the whales were taking turns rubbing their bodies on these rocks,” Fortune said.
Paul Anderson, a research scientist at Mystic Aquarium who wasn’t involved in the study, told National Geographic that this discovery offered some new information about bowhead whales: “This is really exciting. I’ve heard about this in beluga whales and orcas, but never in bowheads.”
According to the New York Times, understanding why these whales choose specific habitats will also help climate change researchers as they look at how rising temperatures are affecting marine creatures and how climate change as a whole will affect the future of marine life.