Rare Video Shows Sucker Fish on a ‘Whale-Surfing Joyride’

A researcher’s attempt to study humpback whales as they migrate off the coast of Australia managed to capture some rare footage of another fish hitching a ride on the supersized mammal.

Olaf Meynecke of the Whales and Climate Research Program at Griffith University suction-cupped cameras to the back of some of the whales traversing the humpback highway, a migratory corridor that the whales use annually, according to the Associated Press.

He wanted to see how the whales behaved on their journey.

However, Meynecke was surprised to see that the cameras were picking up footage of remoras, a breed of fish known more commonly as sucker fish.

As the name implies, sucker fish quite literally attach themselves to the whales using an adhesive plate on their heads to hitch an easy ride across the ocean. The whole time that they’re tagging along, they are living upside down, eating and breeding on the backs of the whales.

Per the outlet, remoras feast on the whale’s dead skin and sea lice in what is thought to be a symbiotic relationship.

“They have their entire meal, and they all have their mates with them as well. So they are mating and reproducing on the whale’s body. It’s like the perfect vehicle for them,” Meynecke explained.

Meynecke’s footage showed just how adept the sucker fish are at riding on the whales. In the footage, the fish were seen letting go just before one of the larger sea animals breached the waters. After it came back under, they reattached themselves and continued the ride.

He noted that the fish were present in large groups, sometimes as many as 50 clustered on one whale.

“Whenever the whale was breaching and doing in particular fast movements it appears that the sucker fish were responding very quickly to the movements,” he told the outlet. “They knew exactly when to let go of the body of the whale before it was breaching the surface of the water and then returned to the same spot only seconds later.”

While it is believed that the whales and fish have a mutually beneficial relationship, Meynecke was not as sure that the humpbacks were enjoying the tagalongs.

“We’ve had individuals with high numbers of these remoras and they were continually breaching and there were no other whales that they were communicating with,” he told AP. “It appeared that they’re trying to just get rid of some of these remoras and they were checking whether they had less after they breached.”

Speaking to AP, Meynecke noted that there are still plenty of questions about the fish and how they interact with the whales.

Notably, he wondered if there were certain parts of the whale’s body that were better for them to cling to, saying that they might have found a way to “reduce any kind of drag” that they experience while being carried along.

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Another question is what happens to the fish when they let go.

“I suspect that the majority would probably leave at some point, maybe in temperate waters, but then where do they go?” he asked. “Do they find other species that they can then use as a host and wait until the humpback whales have come back?”

Sucker fish, which have a lifespan of approximately two years, do manage to get by without whales. The outlet noted that they have been known to catch a ride on other sea life, such as manta rays and dolphins. Some have even been known to cling to a scuba diver.