TRAVEL
Nobody knew much about the life of whale sharks until the l970s. Certainly nobody knew they were found off Australia’s shores in such numbers. And it is only in the last ten years that anyone has begun to study them seriously. The creatures are not thought to be migratory. The theory is that they live deep in the ocean only coming up at certain times of the year. Off Western Australia the continental shelf drops away only 20km offshore. This may be why these deep sea dwellers come up so close to land. In most other parts of the world the shelf extends much further out to sea. One possibility is that the sharks come into shallow water between April and the end of June to
Their tail fin is twice as tall as your average basketball player (about 4m) and as I swim alongside its head, I swear that a 10-year-old child could play hide-andseek in its giant swaying gills. feed on the coral spawn which is released at that time of year. Wherever it came from, the shark I am seeing is hard to miss. The thing is immense. Whale sharks grow to up to 18m long, that’s longer than a city bus. Their tail fin is twice as tall as your average basketball player (about 4m) and as I swim alongside its head, I swear that a 10-year-old child could play hide-and-seek in its giant swaying gills. My overwhelming feeling is of being in the presence of an ancient, primitive and very
alien creature. I have been lucky enough to get almost as close to humpback whales, which are similar in size. Both species are equally awesome but with the whales you get some sense of communication, some feeling that they have a curiosity about you. We swim close by the whale shark for around 15 minutes before it dived deeper but there isn’t a flicker of interest in us — not even as potential lunch. Whale sharks feed on plankton, krill and very small fish, although they do have 40 rows of hand grenade- sized teeth; which seems to me an excessively large number for a shark that only need to sieve plankton. However,
Physicianlife
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