Google ‘smooth skin’ and you’ll find over 170 million results with articles about how to exfoliate and products and tools to buy to slough off dead skin.
But it’s not just humans that exfoliate, researcher Sarah Fortune discovered that bowhead whales in Cumberland Sound, Canada, use a cluster of large boulders to remove the skin that sheds in the summer when they move to warmer places.
Fortune wasn’t trying to find out more about whale grooming habits though, she was trying to track these whales and find out more about their feeding habits by attaching non-invasive video cameras to their backs.
She published her findings in a journal this week, alongside some images showing evidence of rubbing patterns and skin peeling off after the whale had had a good old rub on the group of rocks.
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‘It’s fascinating to understand that this habitat we’ve been studying, where we’ve seen whales for hundreds of years, is a multiuse area,’ Fortune said of her findings, according to the New York Times.
‘They’re coming here because they can feed but also to use warmer waters and these rocks to facilitate molting.’
The warmer temperature is thought to encourage the skin to loosen – soooooo just like at the spa when you soak your feet before having them rubbed with a pumice stone.
The bowheads go back to the same spot every year in the summer, the research showed, and now scientists know exactly why.
The research is not only helpful for understanding whale behaviour, but it will also keep human development away from that area, preserving it for this very important summer whale spa.
‘There’s going to be a northern expansion in human activity,’ added Fortune. ‘So it’s important to know what the purpose is of the areas that the whales are occupying so we can manage human activities in that area.’
Other animals that exfoliate include some brown bears (yes, really) who use barnacles to scratch off excess skin and fur, according to The Week – and obviously Baloo and other real bears scratch against trees too.
Now that we know whales are exfoliating each summer, isn’t it time we upped our own regime? pulls out pink exfoliating mitts
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.