How Whale Sharks Work

are you falling sleep? Buddy? Meditating? It's the morning. This is not our usual time to record, so I'm very curious to see just how much worse than usual this one through. But it is Friday morning, is it? You know me? I'm big on the Friday recording. It's Friday short stay again. I know Chuck looks like a straight up summer babe, ye call them, but his legs look like milk bottles. A good thing. Pretty white Okay, Yeah I thought you meant the curvature. Okay, the white notes.

So yeah, no, they look at it. It only slathers me with some block because I'm not allowed to beatan anymore. Do you have to wear like one of those big sun hats when you go out. I do. My dad dresses like that. He dresses like he's afraid of stars or something. He puts on a big old hat and a little surgical mask the lawn and oh yeah, it's awesome. He gets very androgynous when he's mowing the lawn. Okay, it's weird, Chuck. We got a package recently that I

would like you to describe, Josh. This is Dare I say, one of the cooler promotional items I've ever seen from a company. Agreed, Yeah, this is from our parent company, Discovery. And what they did was they sent out to promote their Shark Week, which, as everyone knows, is huge. It is.

Have you ever seen the shark gun the building at a Discovery HQ and describing, Well, it's a pretty standard looking building normally, but around Shark Week time they have a giant shark head coming on the building on one side and a giant shark tail coming out on the other and I suspect a giant shark fin coming out of the top and on the sides. It looks awesome. It's pretty cool. Actually, you can google that if you're

interested in looking at that. I think if you like to look up Discovery headquarters Shark weeken shore, you can find pictures and talking. I know a little bit about sharks. We've written tons of articles on him around Shark Week, many many, And so what they sent out was it's a jar art directed to look like an old beat up jar short that may have washed up on shore. And inside we were surprised to first find a pair of chewed up beat shorts, bloody, blood stained beat shorts.

And we've been warned that they were gonna smell. They didn't in fact smell right, They did not smell like death or gore. We got this cool giant shark tooth with a on a little key chain. We got another little another little floaty keychain with is an O bit in there the obituaries, an obituary type as if it was from an old newspaper of Chief Martin Brody from

Jaws Fame. And one of our marketing people, sam A Dorno, found that her O bit turned up in one of the marketing packages to scanning her own death notice on the date of her funeral. Interesting, yeah, he's lovely in fetching, sam A Dorna, and uh so, yeah, they sent out all this stuff and basically it's they sent him to just different companies and media outlets around the country. They did it anonymously, right it was. That's yeah, that's the

trick is you don't really know what it is. You just get this suspicious package that I never would have opened had I not known where it was from, to be honest, it would have frightened me. It is pretty cool, but yeah, it is really cool, good idea, but it directs you to go to frenzied waters dot com, right, yeah, and the cool stuff on that thanks in part to our own Mr Chuck Bryant, who helped come up with some aspects of this marketing campaign. Didn't you. I mean,

what don't you do, Chuck? I do it all due, Yeah you do. You wear many hats and each one is more fetching than the last. Yeah. I did the the fake diary thing from the shark attacks of nineteen sixteen, and I'm really excited. It's it's an awesome, cool thing to work on. And our our sisters in arms over at us Stuffy missed in history class. I think they just recorded one, right, um, the shark attacks of nineteen sixteen,

which really happened. Yeah, it was a great story. I was a little jealous I got to do that one. But is that why you haven't been talking to either of them? I know I've boycotted them. Yeah. Well we happen to do something pretty cool recently, So back to us. Yeah, it's always about us, um and uh, that is that we swam with whale sharks, among many other types of fish and sharks and skates and rays. Yeah, that manor ray was huge. We we swam with the manaray that

was at least the size of me yr Chuck. Yeah, I mean it looked the wingspan had to be, uh six or eight feet across. It was a big, big boy. Very cool. The big attraction this is at the Georgia Aquium, the bigger track and those definitely the whale sharks, which were I think sixteen two I think was the female was. Yeah, and you know what that was. It was a noticeable difference when that female came by. That's the coolest thing I've ever had the opportunity to do. Yeah, so let's

let's talk about whale sharks. We'll talk about swimming with them a little more in a little more detail. But Chuck tell me about whales sharks. And this is based on an article on how stuff works dot com that you wrote. Indeed, you are the whale shark expert. You spank me whenever we get into whale shark trivia and I stalk off crime, which is all the time. Yeah. Uh yeah, let's talk about the whale shark. Everyone knows

that it is the largest fish in the sea. I didn't know that, which also makes it the largest shark h in the sea. And some of these can reportedly grow to over sixty feet dude, which is like twenty ft longer than a full size school bus. Can you imagine seeing one the largest one we saw the other day? Can you imagine one three times that size? Yeah? I can't either. No, I mean it's just mammoth. One of the other things that I noticed when we were swimming

with them that I just found amazing. You remember the one right before we got out of the tank. Yes, I think it was the female. She was swimming right towards me and then dipped right below me and came within centimeters touching me, But at no point did she touch me, So they apparently have some really great sense of kinetics. Yeah, knowing exactly where every part of their body is in relation to other things, because I don't

understand how it didn't brush against me. Yeah, we have a couple of times we had him swim kind of right under us. We were we didn't do a scuba dive, which just so people know we're up up top, but with a scuba tank and mask, and they would they swam right under us, and I turned around to look and I would see that big tail coming at me, the big dorsal fin, and I just knew it was gonna smack me on the way by, but it just it never did went right on. So they're huge, and

they do appear kind of lumbering, but really they're super graceful. Yeah, they're very cool. And they're cool looking too. And there were hammer heads in there too, There were I was a little nervous hammer heads were kind of eyeing us. Yeah, they kind of stayed download that, which is good. But it turned out to be the grouper who is the big threat, right. Yeah, the grouper was cool looking because it was I mean, a grouper just looks like fish. If you look up fish, it just looks like a fish.

Like you had seen a little small tank, but it was three hundred pounds. It looked like some land of the Lost giant fish, and it was undergoing a sexual transformation like Headwig and the angry inch right. Um. Apparently when they turned about twenty five or so, they go all hermaphrodite and um change sex, and apparently it's not a pleasant process. So we had a grumpy grouper in there who was in a tank with different kinds of sharks rays. It was actually the biggest threat to us

in that tank. Hard to believe. They said, it's the jaw could break your arm down. Pounds of anything can break your arm. So back to the whale shark. Um. The whale shark lives in warm ocean waters pretty much everywhere where it's warm, except the Mediterranean exactly, which I thought was a little It is a little odd. I'd want to hang out in the Mediterranean if I was a whale shark. And they're starting to migrate in in new and surprising places, like they anytime they pop up.

I was reading an article they popped up um off the coast of Mississippi, Louisiana. Actually I'm sorry, UM. And some guy who spotted him was a commercial fisherman and they were hanging around. Uh and within like several hours or a day, his commercial fishing vessel was suddenly a research vessel. All these scientists flew down and chartered his

boat and went out there. He took him out there to to study them because we know so little about him, right, Yeah, for the most part, they're starting to learn though, since we may able to keep them in captivity, they're learning a lot more. As Chris Coco are are host and shark expert at the aquarium. Yeah, and Chuck and I aren't um immune to the arguments about zoology and keeping animals in captivity or the whole concept of a zoo. Um. You know, I definitely see both sides of the argument.

But Chris Coco was able to produce um some evidence that this exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium. And I think they're the only whale sharks in the Western Hemisphere in captivity, right, Yeah, you can find them in Japan and then fifteen minutes down the road from where we are. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Right. So Chris said that they had gotten their whale sharks from Taiwan, which is like the whale shark fishing capital of the world. I think they consume the most whale

shark meat of any country in the world as well. UM. But since that exhibit opened UH and they formed a relationship with Taiwan, Taiwan's kill quota went from I think a couple hundred a year for each individual to zero. And one of the reasons why is um they were able to show that if you if you allow a whale shark to live, if you kill a whale shark in Taiwan, I read that fishermen would get about ten

kilograms a pound or ten cents of kilogram. That was the non conversion ten cents of kilogram for a whale shark me, which is kind of substantial, but really not so much. In India they get something like four thousand dollars a whale shark. UM A lot of money, it is, but that's it. That's all you made off of that whale shark, regardless of the size, right, Okay, but at the same time you've killed it, you can only make

money off of it. It's sale once. Thanks to the burgeoning UM I guess sector of eco tourism, people are starting to figure out that you can make money over and over and over again off of a single whale shark through eco tourism, right because you know we what we did when we swam at the Georgia Aquarium. Anybody can do for like I think two bucks or whatever and for full scuba diving um and Georgia Aquarium is

not the only place to do it. I mean you can do it out in the wild and people are realizing that you can make a ton of money off of it. I think the Australia Conservation Union as demated that the value, the annual value of each whale shark is somewhere in the neighborhood of hundred and eighty two

or two two thousand dollars, and we're talking. You know, some of the economies where whale sharks hang out are not the richest in the world, so you know, they can generate serious income if these these local economies can figure out how to really most efficiently shift from whale

shark fishing to eco tourism and finning, which is gross. Yeah, shark finning for those who don't know, shark fin soup is a delicacy in certain parts of the world, and shark finning literally means you pull the shark up on your boat. Sometimes not even sometimes they do it from the water, dude, and cut the fins off and throw it back in the water, or just keep it in the water where the shark dies and that's it. That's the only part they use is to fin well. They

bleed to death, yes, awful. And they also without their their fin they lose any um way of navigation, so they're just kind of drifting about bleeding to death. It's not a not a nice death. And we should also say to that um. The whale shark doesn't reach reproductive age until they think about twenty five or thirty years, So the problem is, like a lot of animals who have a late reproductive cycle, you kill them before that time, and what's gonna happen. They're not gonna have shark pups.

It has a huge, huge impact done on the species big time, because they have up to like two and three hundred pups at a time. So you're every shark you kill before that age, you're shorting two or three hundred potential sharks. And its biggest predator obviously is the human. Yeah, absolutely, it's the biggest fishing to see, there's not a lot of comers to take on, you know, a whale shark, which is funny because they're so peaceful and gentle. They

really are um and their diet is actually really really light. Yeah, let's talk about that. That's cool. Okay. So they are filter feeders, right. Uh. They generally just eat plankton, which is really tiny, nearly microscopic um plant an animal life just kind of is suspended in the ocean. They're also surface dwellers, which is where the plankton is, and krill too, which are like teeny little shrimps and actual little shrimp as well. Uh. And in captivity, they also love dog food.

It looked like remember those little brown cubes of nastiness they're feeding it. Yeah, that was a gelatine mixture that they made their dequarian. But for their size, you know, they actually don't eat a lot right at once, but they eat constantly out in the wild, right, It's all they do. So they're they're drifting along with their mouth open pretty much, and the plankton goes in right like a little vacuum. Huh. And then whatever can't get out of the gills get stuck there. And what do they

do chuck. Well, they the gills actually as like a like a strainer, so the water goes out and then they're the algae and the krill and everything or in the mouth. And don't they cough? And they cough it like they howk up a bunch of planktons. Oh yeah, if they if it's too big, if I think two centimeters, anything over two centimeters, they'll hack back up and spit out.

And I did ask, actually Gus ask Chris at the aquarium, like, when you're feeding these guys, do they did one of these other fish because the other fish kind of hang out to try and get little leftovers. Yeah. Remember, And I was like, do you ever see one of the bigger fish accidentally get sucked in this huge mouth? He said, yeah, that's happened a couple of times, and they pretty much cough it peck out really quickly. And he said that swims out of the fish is expelled it about twice

the speed it was originally going in. I really wanted to see that. I didn't, Yeah, because you know, fish make funny faces when they're scared. So we have figured out some stuff about whale sharks um just from the few studies that have been able to be conducted. I read an estimate Chuck that there was like five hundred thousand and estimated five hundred thousand in the wild, which is really really low. Yeah, especially considering that millions of

sharks are killed each year recreationally. Millions, dude, millions. The highest estimate I saw was a hundred million. The in the media and I think was about thirty million. Sad, but yeah, if there's five hundred thousand of you and people are indiscriminately killing sharks and you're in trouble, yeah, well their listed is vulnerable by the World Conservation Union, so that's no good. But what we have figured out for a long time, they thought that whale sharks actually

laid eggs, right, yeah, which is not the case. Now they have pups they do um. I think in female whale shark was killed and they cut her open and found three hundred well shark pups sixteen. I bet that is one of the cutest things you've ever seen, dead whale shark pups. No, well, it's it's funny. Yeah, I forgot the fact that the fact that they were dead, that's under pretty insensitive. I would just say, like a two ft whale shark pup would be really cute alive,

I'm sure, because they're pretty cute. Twenty ft they are. Yeah, they they have their mouths are at the front of their face, not under the unusual flash shark yeah usually, and it's just this big, wide, narrow, gaping mall. Yeah, a big square head really, and their eyes are real tiny and kind of on the side, and they're just they're cute, they're big. You just want to cuddle with them.

I know, I really wanted to touch one and kind of give it a hug, but they said, uh, and we'll actually talk about this when you're swimming with the fish in the wild. It's called a soft encounter. Yeah, So basically, you want to be a you want to watch, you don't want to be a participant. Well, anytime they got nearest, we had to like lay flat and still and just let them pass by and let him check us out. Pretty cool, yeah, but they're they're whale sharks.

Aren't the only things that you can have a soft encounter with, right, We can have a soft encounter with you, big boy. It would be super soft encounter. Even our producer Jerry got in on that, Yes, you can also swim with humpback whales. It's pretty popular. Um in the Dominican Republic and the South Pacific island of Ponga, you

can swim with humpback whales, another docile creature and chuck. Actually, there's a there's a place in the Philippines that has become kind of a hot spot for um soft encounters, soft in water encounters. Right, soft encounter cracks me up so much, it is kind of funny. Um. And that's a doncile Philippines right right. They were really the kind of the first to get on board with the soft encounter eco tourism thing. Um, and they've kind of provided

a model for everybody else. Absolutely. You know another creature that people like swimming with, but it doesn't usually work out. Dolphins. People love dolphins. Well, yeah, you said in another article that you wrote, um, what was the name of it?

What sea creatures can you swim with? Yeah? That that you would think that, you know, you just hang onto the dolphins fin and go for a ride and maybe it would let you, But all of a sudden you'd find that you were going really fast and if the dolphin wanted to dive really deep and you would be in some serious trouble. Yeah, dolphins are fun, but there's no way you're gonna do the flipper thing and hang on and take a little ride. Plus also they're deadly

deadly creatures. Are they hate humans? Dolphins? Now? I thought they like people. You're josh and they're all about the soft encounter. Um, there is another side of the coin here. You can also swim with sea lions by the way, and sting rays, ah and seals here and there, Like in the UK you can swim with seals. But there is another side to this which a lot of wildlife experts kind of decry this whole practice, and they say you shouldn't be able to do this at sea world.

You shouldn't do this in the wild because when you swim with sharks like um, the small reef sharks and things will chum the water. They say that disrupts their feeding cycle and just being humans being around them basically says disrupts their whole uh underwater system they got going there? Oh yeah, definitely. I mean think about we're we're all pretty much lousy with swine flu these days. You don't need to that into their environment. It's terrible, So there

are two sides to the coin. I mean, it's good for a lot of these places. It's a big part of their uh, their income as a country. You know a lot of these places are poor. You know, they're not like swimming off the coast of Abitha or anything like that. No, like Philippines not necessarily the wealthiest country in the world. Yeah, so they could use the money. Um, where do you fall What do you think of eco

tourism versus the butchering of sharks? Well, no, no, no no, I mean I mean just period, like should they be completely left alone or should this stuff be allowed? I'm curious because I still don't know what to think. I think you can learn a lot, but who knows if

there's any damage being done. Well. Yeah, Also in the other problems you posted about, um, the French tourism board asking Parisians to smile at the tourist swine recently, right, I mean, there are a lot of yokels out there who would love to just maybe get in a slap fight with the seal or something like that. Um, so there's always that danger. But again, I think if it's the if it's the choice between making money, you have

to make money. Humans have to make money, and if you're a coastal economy, you're gonna make money off of the sea. So you're gonna make money off of the seat through conservation that eco tourism can provide, or you're gonna do it by catching and killing whale sharks for their fits. Right, That's clearly the choice is obvious, and there's but there's also more sustainable ways that you can

carry out ecotourism as well. And I think that since it's such a new embudding economic sector, we don't really fully know how to do that yet, but I think it's good that that's the direction we're moving it. Yeah, that's that's my final judgment. What I want to do now is uh, and I now I kept you because you're scuba certified. Apologize again, don't worry about it. I kept you from scuba diving because I could not scuba dive and we both had to stay together. Uh, that's

my next goal. I want to get down there because we got some of the we got the big the whale shark, and we got some of the smaller fish checking us out. But I wanted to get down there with the sharks. The hammer head and the reef shark What did you think about breathing underwater? Though? How cool? Is that? Pretty cool? When you're actually completely submerged and you're pretty cool underwater. It's it's the most amazing thing ever. Yeah,

but it wore me out. We talked about that. I was exhausted, were totally wiped for the rest of the And it wasn't just the bacon cheeseburger and chicken fingers we each had for lunch afterward. It was definitely the compressed air has an effect. But it's still pretty cool hobby, albeit probably the most expensive one around aside from maybe private private piloting. Yeah, I would say that's expensive to I got one more thing for the whale sharks for you. What you got? So? India is a huge um whale

shark fishing capital. And uh, there was a holy man named um Murari Bapu who a couple of years back was visiting Vera Belle, India, which is a coastal town. And Um he waded out into the water and saw a whale shark caught in a net and he blessed it and said that he would like to see this whale shark freed and left alone. And this really bustling whale shark capital suddenly its whale shark fishing dropped off completely, and the local government had been trying to prevent whale

shark fishing for years to no avail. This guy goes out there blesses a whale shark, and all of a sudden, they don't whale shark out there anymore. Huh. Yeah, so maybe we could get al gore in a robe or something. And yeah, I don't know how much credit he would get and say Louisiana, but he's he's working his magic in India sportsman's paradise. So go bapoo, thank you. I had a soft encounter with him. That's it for whale sharks.

And uh, we would like to go ahead and tell you to head on over to Frenzied waters dot com that has Mr Chuck Bryant and some of our other staffers from how Stuff Works dot COM's work um on that site. You can also check out shark week dot com for a bunch of stuff on the internet for Shark Week, and if you're too lazy to type, you can just watch Shark Week on Discovery Channel from August second to eight yeah, and watch Blood in the Water. That's the show they did about the UH nineteen sixteen

and tax in New Jersey. It's really cool. I watched it. Oh yeah, good. And if you want to see the picture of Josher's and I with the whale sharks, I put one up in the blog. Yeah. What was the name of the post. I believe it was Josh and Chuck swim with Sharks appropriately enough, Yes, I should have been Josh and Chuck has soft Encounter, but that would

have been a different picture altogether. You can find that and actually you can also find some really nice articles that Chuck Bryant wrote on sharks in general on how stuff Works dot com. And Molly Edmonds she wrote a lot of them. Sure so did Toothman. Yeah. Um, you can find those on how stuff Works dot com. And since I just said that word together, that means it's time for a listener man, right, Okay, Josh, I'm just

gonna call this one uh toxo listener mail. And I knew, dude that when we did the taxo plasmosis, that we would have one person that says, I've got it and here's what it's like. Well, technically, of the people who write and should say that they have it. Yeah, but this guy like, all right, just let me read it to you. This is from Josh. Is this my life as a taxo fetus? Just listen to your toxoplasmosis podcast and blew my mind, Or maybe my mind was broken

already since I was born with the parasite. My mother grew up on a farm that was lousy with barn cats and often had the duty of changing the household litter box. When she was pregnant and I was an early term fetus, her doctor told her that she had high levels of toxoplasmosis and the test suggested that her baby ME would likely have severe birth defects, including I

am not making this up, the failure to develop a head. Awesome. Obviously, such a fetus would be still born, and the doctor recommended that my mother consider her options, including an early term abortion. My mom stuck it out until her first ultrasound and a number of subsequent tests suggested that I did indeed have a head, so ye haw h. The doctor still warned of the possible mental handicaps, including mental retardation, but my eventual birth and years of elementary school test

proved him wrong once again. So I supposed to take away from your listener is if you're a pregnant woman with toxoplasmos toxoplasmosis, don't give up hope because your baby just might pull through and have a head after all. Listening to your podcast, I found that many of the associated behaviors of toxoplasmosis hosts fit our situation. My mother is indeed warm and open hearted, and I am kind of a stubborn and dogmatic jerk. I don't have any

fondness for cats. However, I wouldn't diagn diagnose myself as schizophrenic. The two of my other personalities would disagree. Josh is a funny guy. Um a very us enjoyed the podcast and hope you're both enjoying the Georgian summer heat. We are not, in fact, Josh, Yeah, that was from John asked it here, who was a PhD candidate at the Department of Natural Resource Science at the University of Rhode Island.

Thanks Josh, and good luck to you on your doctoral candidacy. Also, we got a bunch of emails Chuck from people who wanted to know how they could be diagnosed or not diagnosed with toxoplasmosis and um. From what I understand, it's just a simple blood test to check for anybodies that that developed a ward off the taxoplasmatic systems at your local CDs under the taxo plasmosis island right not true or Jimmy's bait shop and blood test galore right, he

serves up live bait, toxoplasmosa tests and express up. Have you seen that place indicator that's that It says live bait pets taxes really yea interesting they sell live bait and do taxes? Didn't make you an expressive? Sure? If you want to talk to Chuck and I about any possible developmental diseases that you're in danger of having as a fetus, you can send us an email to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff

works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page. Because you listen to this podcast, you're probably a forward thinker interested in topics like green technology, community, renewable resources, and the future of the world as we know it? Are we right? If so? Go to how stuff works dot com and search forward thinking to find out more. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you