06/02/25
At this point in your journey through my website, you may be wondering: why whale sharks? Simply put, they are my favorite animal. It all started in second or third grade, when I visited the Georgia Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the Western hemisphere. The aquarium is home to many animals, but the star of the show is definitely the whale shark. As soon as I saw them in Ocean Voyager (the exhibit they live in), I was in love. I started collecting newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and information in a journal and told people I had written a book about them. (In reality it was just me copying information with slight alterations from various websites into this journal, but I digress.) Speaking of books, at one point I begged the tooth fairy to bring me a book about whale sharks. (Our tooth fairy either brought you a dollar or a book- the book was the better deal, for sure.) It took over a month to arrive (I believe it had to come from Australia), but I got that book. I used to carry around a plastic whale shark with me and had at least four different whale shark plushies on my bed at all times, one about four feet long. The obsession definitely simmerred down as time passed, but I still love whale sharks and have many different plushies of them in my room. (Thank you San-X for making Jinbesan.) Here I hope to share a little bit about my favorite animal in the entire world, so hopefully you can appreciate them a little bit more too!
Whale Sharks, known by their scientific name Rhincodon typus, are the largest fish in the world. They are actually both fish and sharks, but they are not whales, as their name may lead you to believe. Their average length is anywhere from 18-32 feet, but the largest whale shark accurately measured was 61.7 feet long! While their mouths are giant, they have tiny throats and would be completely unable to swallow a human or anything near that size; they are in fact filter feeders and enjoy munching on plankton and krill and nothing much larger than that. They live in the tropical Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans and typically live offshore, though they do come to coral reefs and atolls sometimes if there is a large concentration of food there. Whale sharks spend a lot of their daylight hours cruising through the shallow depths of the ocean, most likely feeding. They are sadly an endangered species, and the World Wildlife Fund is doing a lot to research about the sharks and improve safety around whale shark-related tourism in the Phillipines and Mexico. Whale sharks are amazing creatures and I hope you've learned something new by reading this!
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06/02/25
