- A video showing a boat captain pulling parasites off a whale's head in a Mexican lagoon went viral.
- But a behavioral scientist told Insider that removing the parasites can actually hurt the whale.
At first glance, the viral video appears to show a heartwarming act of human kindness.
In the footage, a massive gray whale approaches a small tourist boat in the Ojo de Liebre, a lagoon on the Pacific coast of Mexico's Baja Peninsula.
The whale sticks its head out and then appears to let the boat's captain pick parasites off its body as it spins around and cheering tourists watch on.
But to Shari Bondy, a behavioral scientist who runs her own whale-watching company in the area and has studied its gray whales for decades, the video is disturbing.
"People are going to get hurt because of that video," Bondy, told Insider in an interview. "They're going to think: 'Oh, look, the whale loves this', but actually it's really bad for them."
Bondy said that picking parasites like barnacles off a whale could hurt them because they have extremely thin and sensitive skin.
"People think the whales have got that big layer of blubber, that they don't feel anything, but that's not true," she said. "So pulling parasites off with your fingers is certainly very, very painful for the whale," she said.
"The barnacles in their skin have a foot that sinks in, that screws itself and embeds into the blubber by quite a bit. Could be even up to an inch down there. And they're very hard," she added.
Barnacles, she said, can only be pulled off by humans when they're already hanging by a thread, or the whale's skin is already shedding.
"Whales, for thousands of years, have been surviving without people picking parasites off," she told Insider.
If the parasites bother the whales, they will often crush them by rubbing their bodies on the bottom of the boat or swimming into fresh water so they fall off, she said.
Bondy is also worried that if tourists pick parasites from whales, the sea mammal could react aggressively toward them.
"Picking off barnacles is really not going to help a whale. They have thousands of barnacles on them, picking one off might be cool for you, but if you have a whole boatload of people trying to pick barnacles off whales, it can just get dangerous," she added.
Gray whales, on the other hand, are also becoming less afraid of boats, and enjoy the attention of humans. Bondy and her daughter like to interact with the whales through physical touch, she said.
"Just don't mess with it," Bondy added.
The Ojo de Liebre is home to around 2,000 whales that visit the lagoon to breed. Multiple whale-watching tours operate in the area.