Whale Shark

Fascinating facts about the Whale Shark

• Whale sharks can dive to depths of about 1,928 m, a depth where sunlight barely reaches, yet they can still see thanks to a blue-light-tuned rhodopsin. Their eyes contain a rhodopsin mutated to sense blue light, allowing clear vision in the dark ocean and protecting the pigment from heat-induced decay in warm surface waters.
• A 12.1 m whale shark was measured with a mouth 1.55 m wide. Such a gigantic oral aperture, combined with over 300 rows of tiny teeth and 20 filter pads, enables the animal to gulp huge volumes of water and filter out microscopic prey, illustrating how size and specialized anatomy work together for filter feeding.
• Satellite tags have tracked individual whale sharks for up to three years, revealing repeat migrations to tuna spawning grounds and seasonal deep dives to 200 m for temperature regulation. This shows that whale sharks time their movements to follow prey pulses.
• A single whale shark can push more than 6,000 L of seawater through its sieve-like gill pads each hour, filtering out plankton, krill and tiny fish.
• A pregnant 10.6 m female once carried about 300 embryos, each 42-63 cm long, confirming that whale sharks are ovoviviparous live-bearers.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia
• Mongabay

At a glance

About the Whale Shark

In the warm, crystal waters of the tropics, the whale shark glides effortlessly, its massive, spotted form undulating through the coral seas with a gentle, ethereal grace. As it moves, its broad, flat head sweeps from side to side, filtering the sun-drenched waters for the plankton and small fish that sustain it, its very existence a testament to the awe-inspiring diversity of life on our planet. Despite its enormity, this majestic creature is a fragile giant, its numbers dwindling in the face of human threat, making every encounter with this endangered leviathan a poignant reminder of the beauty and fragility of the natural world.

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