Wednesday 8 February 2012

8 Feb 2012 - Whale Sharks can live for 70 years

I was reading an article in The Age today about a whale shark that was found dead in waters near Pakistan. The whale shark weighed seven tonnes and was ten metres long. At the bottom of the article there were some Big Fish Facts which stated that whale sharks on average weight up to twenty tonnes and can be twelve metres or more long. I saw the picture of the whale shark that had been discovered in the article, and it looked huge. To think this one is really only a smaller whale shark makes me not want to go swimming at the beach! I mean what do they usually eat in order to put on that much weight, I bet surfers and snorkelers make up a huge percentage of their diet. It turns out after further read that I am wrong, the whale sharks are actually filter feeding sharks mainly, which means they eat plankton (microscopic animals and plants) and are not hunting for swimmers. Still I might be a little careful in case they change their diet. Judging from their reported size I should be able to see them coming!

All of this however were things that I learnt today, but the thing that most surprised me, after a further Google search, was that whale sharks can live up to 70 years of age. I found this surprising because, I didn't think that fish lived that long! I know that some turtles have long life spans (I know this because even once you flush them down the toilet by accident, they turn into mutants and fight crime, I think I learned it in a documentary), but I had no idea that any sharks lived that long. It turns out the whale sharks are actually related more to whales, of which some species can live for over 100 years, than to sharks, which generally live between 20-30 years. I am glad that as well as life span, that whale sharks follow whale's eating habits, because if they did chase humans, that would be a long time to be avoiding the same shark.

Check out the original article for a picture of the shark in The Age or the further research on Wikipedia.

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