WHEN WHALES GET A SPA TREATMENT.

In 2014, Sarah Fortune, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia, Canada, was trying to tag bow-head whales with transmitters so she could study their feeding habits. But the whales kept swimming into a small, shallow bay with large boulders, where at least one removed a transmitter by rubbing against the rocks. Though she didn't know it at the time, the mystery of the rock-rubbing whales dates back at least 170 years, with several papers noting the behaviour and usually concluding the whales were using the rocks to rest. But Fortune noticed that large pieces of skin were peeling off some of the whales. Perhaps, she thought, they were "using these rocks like humans using pumice stones, to get rid of calluses or dead skin". 
Fortune and a team of researchers published a paper in 'PLOS One' on 22nd November, 2017 (Wednesday) that seems to confirm her suspicions. Overhead footage of whales taken in 2016 - part of another study - reveals the animals are using large rocks to rub dead skin off their bodies.
-Challapalli Srinivas Chakravarthy-
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