Like GPS tracker from the Pleistocene , barnacles that once hitch rides on the backs of kyphosis and gray whales criminal record details of their ancient migration more than 270,000 years ago .
Writing in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , researchers at the University of California , Berkeley have found that modern whales apply similar migrant routes to their prehistorical relatives .
Barnacles are coin - sized crustaceans that literally stick to one position for their entire sprightliness . besiege by a hard protective shell , thecrustaceansstick out feather - like legs to seize go through microscopic organisms in the water as they catch a drive from migrating whales in a kinship identify ascommensal .
barnacle goose that attach to whales rather than stationary rocks or boats do so by boring into the whale ’s tegument . Throughout the form of their life history , barnacles grow up to a few millimeters each calendar month by adding atomic number 20 carbonate from seawater to their shell . In doing so , the creature become index number of sea conditions at the time , tape contingent about the waters that whale transmigrate through . They hold this entropy even after they die , come off , and fossilize , which allows scientists to follow the real - clock time migration of host giant from warmer reproduction earth in the South Pacific to colder feeding grounds in Alaska and the Arctic .
Barnacle bunch and the prints they leave assist scientists to identify individual heavyweight – dissimilar species of whale barnacle twit on different species of whales , allowing paleontologist to couple fossilized barnacles with their previous host mintage . For at least 270,000 days , some populations of humpback whales have been meeting off the coast of Panama and , surprisingly , still do so today .
“ One of the more exciting thing about the paper , in my idea , is that we find evidence for migration in all of these ancient populations , from three dissimilar site and time periods , but also from both humpback and gray whale lineage , indicating that these creature , which lived hundred of thousands of eld ago , were all attempt migration exchangeable in extent to those of innovative - day whales , ” explained marine palaeontologist Larry Taylor in astatement .
This information countenance researchers to see how migratory convention have affect the evolution of whales over the last 3 to 5 million years , and how past adaptation to changing clime might assist promise how modern whales will respond to environmental changes today .
“ We require to understand how malleable migratory behavior has been through time , how rapidly whale have adjust to previous climate changes , and see if this can give us some cue as to how they might respond to the current changes in Earth ’s climate , ” Taylor say . “ How will whales cope with that , how will the solid food theme shift , how will the whale themselves respond ? ”
