Emotional anguish and whale shark encounters
Posted By Vladimir Soto on 6 December 2006
Now, what's the 'big' deal, pun intended, about these fellows? Well, size is obviously one, since the Rhincodon typus (that'd be the way you say whale shark in academia) is in fact not only the largest living shark but also the largest known fish, and just to highlight its uniqueness it also happens to be the sole member of the family Rhincodontidae. But to be in close proximity to one of these gentle, elegant giants does things to a diver that are hard to describe in a science class. Call me drama-trauma-baby but chances are your first time being in the water with a whale shark close enough to you it could count the bits of plankton stuck to your nose hairs is something you'll remember for longer than most of your other first times.
Even though not much is actually known of these innocuous goliaths one thing is obvious, they are rare. The Shark Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of public awareness of sharks and their vital role in the marine ecosystem mentions in its site that only 320 sightings had been recorded in all of western scientific literature as recently as 1986. That's certainly not a lot. They also tend to aggregate during specific seasonal periods, which is how I got to see so many in Mexico, but unfortunately they do this also in areas of the world where the circumstances of culture and necessity makes them the prime target of some fisheries.
Again, the Shark Research Institute sites as an example how three villages in India slaughtered some 1,000 whale sharks in 1999 alone! The Georgia Aquarium, for example, the largest aquarium in the world and also one of only two aquariums in the world to have successfully attempted to keep a whale shark in captivity, the other is in Okinawa, Japan, got their two whale sharks, Ralph and Norton, by buying them off a Taiwanese fishery which had caught them for human consumption.
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