The Whale Shark -The Largest Fish Ever Known

As the title says, the Whale Shark is the biggest living fish that we have on this beautiful earth of ours, the Whale Shark prefers the warmer waters of the tropics and the warmer oceans, even though he lives in the open sea.

The very first time when they identified the Whale Shark was in 1828, the specimen that they got was harpooned off the coast of South Africa. The name Whale Shark was given because they had found an animal that was obviously a shark; it was as big as a whale and had the same type of feeding method.

The Whale Shark can be found in tropical waters and they are usually alone. Unless there is a lot of food around, they usually stay off shore but it has been reported that they come in to shore on rare occasions.

The Whale Shark has a mouth that is about five feet wide and it contains up to four hundred rows of little tiny teeth. The small eyes are on the front of the Whale Shark’s huge head and the five humongous gills are at a place that we would call the neck. The Whale Shark is beautiful, its body is covered in white spots on a grey background, each animal has a unique set of spots which makes it rather easy to identify individuals.

The Whale Shark can grow to huge lengths, some say that they have spotted Whale sharks with over sixty-eight feet in length, although, the scientific community does not really believe this because they have not exactly gotten proof of any such creatures.
The Whale Shark is a filter feeder and it needs a lot of plankton to keep it going, the Whale Shark has the ability to pump water over its gills and the plankton is then trapped by a raking apparatus to trap the plankton and send it on its way to the stomach.

This is the Shark that they use to explain to the public that not all sharks are man-eaters, it is reportedly even playful with the divers and they say that sometimes it even lays still, upside-down to allow the divers to scrape parasites and other little things off of their belly; the only thing that you have to be careful of is that you don’t get hit with the Whale Shark’s giant tail.

The reproductive ways of the Whale Shark are pretty much unknown, people used to think that the eggs were released into the water, by the female, and then they were fertilized by the male, but the recent capture of a female has proven them all wrong. She had three hundred pups inside of her, this proved that the Whale Shark gives birth to live babies…they grow up and start making babies of their own at around thirty years of age. Scientists consider that the Whale Shark can live up to one hundred and sixty years old.

The number of Whale Sharks in the wild is not known and there are few enough in captivity, they have not yet been able to start any kind of breeding program so as to study the reproductive habits of the Whale Shark in captivity.

It is amazing when you look into the animal world and find so many wonderful, complex and diverse creatures; the Whale Shark is only one of them. There are so many secrets that the ocean is just waiting to give up, you would think that there would be more people out there trying to be the first person to discover them.

The land has a lot to offer us as well, we just need to take the time to stop and listen and we could find out a lot of stuff by just paying attention for once in our life, God gave us these things so that we can enjoy them and take care of them… maybe it was time we stopped thinking only about our own little selfish lives and started thinking about the creatures around us. There is so much more to this world then our daily lives!

There are new discoveries all the time so maybe, by paying a little more attention, we might notice something amazing, remember that the Dead Sea scrolls were found by a boy who went there with his goats! Never knows!