Whale Sharks - A Must!!

Whale sharks have become my obsession. I don't easily fall into an obsession role as most things come and go in a traveler's life, but my few months spent in Exmouth, Western Australia with these majestic and placid sharks has provided me a passion for a lifetime. If you ever have the desire to be mystified and awed in the same encounter, whale sharks will behold your amusement. This should be a tick on everyone's bucket list!


A Day in the Life

As a tour guide and whale shark spotter I was handed over the responsibility of organizing food, manifests, transportation, entertainment, education, organization, safety, cleanliness, teamwork, administration, and many other hats while taking intrigued guests out for a day to swim with whale sharks. It is no small feat to get 20 people to a jetty, onto a boat, geared up, taught to snorkel (sometimes even how to swim), and tossed into the water to swim with the largest fish on the planet. The largest shark on the planet at that!

After spotter planes go up and a shark is sighted, it is my job to get everyone in order and make sure the first group is  ready to take the plunge.

An alarm is heard in the distance and the first spotter tells everyone to 'jump, jump'. Wrangling up 10 people into a single file line in an open ocean is probably just as difficult as it sounds. Heads are bobbing in and out of the water, guests are flailing around with their noodles, and the lone whale shark spotter is trying to give orders. It sounds a lot like military camp, but I assure you, it is all in a fun whirlwind of organized chaos. The line is ready, the shark is coming, and everyone is directed as to where to look.

 

As we take those first few glimpses of the beautiful creature before us, people forget to start swimming, and the gentle dotted creature begins to get away.

 

Expertly maneuvered, the captain swings around to the group after placing a second group in the water just beyond the whale shark's reach. While the second group is getting an eye full, the first group is frantically doing 'dugong flops' on the marlin board and preparing for their second attempt at viewing an all too often cruisy shark. As the number of drops increases, people tire.

Those who are more comfortable continue to jump in at every opportunity and begin to feel a connection with the side glancing eyeballs peaking out just over the edges of the wide-gaping mouth. After a hand full of jumps, adventure seekers are amazed at this fantastic marine encounter and the ear to ear smiles exhibit it all for the world to see.

Whale sharks aren't the only marine encounters we have the pleasure to share, manta rays, fish, coral reefs, sharks, sting rays, and other marine life abounds. Occasionally a tiger shark is spotted from the boat and crew are given the rare chance to swim with an all too-feared apex predator of the deep blue. Dolphins glide through the water in the hundreds and humpback whales breach within an arm's reach. There is no where on the planet better than Exmouth during whale shark season! 

As the Informative Tour Guide That I Am

I honestly can't get enough of my time with whale sharks. I want to share a bit more about the area in Western Australia as well as a bit more science behind the oftentimes curious encounters.




I have posted below my tour guide speech for guests while we are traveling out to the boat on the Ningaloo Reef with King's Ningaloo Reef Tours. This information is pulled from different resources and is as factual as possible. Enjoy the free tour (without the whale sharks).

Exmouth

 

Just outside of town is the Harold E Holt Navy Base. 

This base was established in the sixties and used as a rest camp for American navy personal during the war. They have a bowling alley, baseball diamond, tennis courts, restaurants, and a cinema. They even drove on the left side of the road and traded with American currency to make them feel right at home whilst they were here. It is now run by the Boeing Australia and the Australian Federal Police, and it’s still a bit of a mystery what actually goes on in there today. Straight ahead of us are 13 towers which are actually very low frequency towers and were erected around the same time as the naval base during the war. They actually chose this spit of land because it is the western most point of Australia. 

The towers were built to be able to communicate with submarines long distances away including submarines stationed kms below the surface. This is the most powerful transmission station in the southern hemisphere operating at 1 megawatt and the station is able to communicate at 18 words per minute with submarines 15 meters under polar icecaps. There are 13 towers named 0-12 as the Americans were superstitious. The towers were arranged in two hexagons, one inside the other, in the form of the strongest structure in nature, just like a honeycomb, snowflakes, and the scutes of a turtle’s shell. Now I know it’s a bit difficult to get a real gage of just how tall these towers are because of our flat landscape, but tower zero is actually 387.9 m tall, which is taller than the Eifel tower. At the base of tower 0 we have the skyscraper of Exmouth. What seems like a little white building is actually 5 stories high and made entirely of ceramic and wood to withstand the extreme heat produced in the transmission room. The people that work inside that room are only aloud 1 hour shifts because of the exposure to such high amounts of radiation. Now, do you see that cabling? If the cabling holding these tall structures erect were laid out in a big line, it would run all the way from here to Carnarvon. There are pivot points in the cabling to allow for sway during strong winds such as cyclones. In 1999 Cyclone Vance hit Exmouth. Winds were clocked in at around 270 km/hour. There was a glass bottom boat at Bundegi Beach that was blown all the way over to the west side of the cape, with its outboard engine found wedged half way up tower 6. So these structures were well engineered for their time. 

Ningaloo Reef

 The Ningaloo Reef is the longest fringing reef in Australia. It stretches 260 kilometres along the west coast of the Cape Range Peninsula near Exmouth, Western Australia approximately 1200km north of Perth. It is the only large reef in the world found so close to a continental land mass; about 100 metres offshore at its nearest point and less than seven kilometers at it’s furthest. The Ningaloo Reef is home to 500 species of colourful tropical fish and 250 species of coral. Six out of seven of the world’s marine turtles are found on the reef; dugong feed on sea grasses within the lagoons; and humpback whales migrate close to the coast. It was named a World Heritage site in 2011. Preferring warm waters, whale sharks populate all tropical seas. They are known to migrate every spring to the continental shelf of Western Australia. The coral spawning during the months of March and April provides the whale shark with an abundant supply of plankton. 

Whale Sharks

 

Whale sharks are actually fish, and classified further as sharks. Not whales. They are made of cartilage, not bone, and have hard, scale-like structures called dentricles, with no fur. They were described as a whale because of their sheer size. As the largest fish in the sea, whale sharks reach lengths of 12 meters or more, and up to 21.5 tons. Our bus is 7 meters to put that into perspective. Females are typically larger than males and scientists believe they mature around 30 years old or about 9 meters. Most of the whale sharks we get in the Ningaloo are immature males. We can tell this by looking underneath each individual and seeing if it has claspers or not. Claspers are hardened structures extending from the pectoral fins just here and are used to hold onto the female during intercourse. 

EATING: The species name of a whale shark is Rhincodon typus with "Rhincodon" meaning "rasp teeth" - which is what the whale shark’s tiny teeth look like (a rasp). The teeth are about the size of a match head or 3 mm high. The whale shark is one of only three filter-feeding sharks (the other two are the basking and megamouth sharks). It feeds on very small plankton including small crustaceans like krill, copepods and crab larvae as well other tiny invertebrates such as squid, small fish and jellyfish. Whale sharks have about 4,000 tiny teeth arranged in more than 300 rows, but they neither bite nor chew their food. Instead, the shark often feeds via passive feeding, by sucking in a mouthful of water, closing its mouth and sieving prey as small as a millimetre through its gills. Gill rakers within the gills are able to catch the small prey, much like a noodle strainer. They are able to open their mouth wider than a meter, and filter up to 6000 liters of water an hour. However, unlike the megamouth and basking sharks, the whale shark does not rely only on forward motion, but can hang vertically in the water and ‘suck' in food, know as active feeding. 

DEFENSE: 1) A whale shark's skin is 10-15 cm thick on it's dorsal side. If an individual feels threatened it will bank, turning its thick, protective skin towards the intrusion or threat. 2) Whale sharks are deep divers and have been documented to depths of over 1.5 kilometers 3) Whale like size. Whale sharks were named based on their massive size. 

REPRODUCTION: 

In 1995 the controversy ended when a team of scientists from National Taiwan Ocean University examined a 10.6 m pregnant whale shark that had been harpooned by Taiwanese fishermen. Her twin uteruses contained 300 embryos ranging in size from 40 to 63 cm at three different stages of development. The female provided proof that the embryos emerge from egg cases while still inside the mother's body and that whale sharks bear live young. Of the 300 embryos, 15 were alive, fully-developed and ready to be born when her environment deemed conducive to do so. It is unknown how long she can hold the sperm or how long a whale shark's gestation period lasts. We are still in the beginning stages of learning more about these majestic creatures. 

RESEARCHER FOR A DAY: 

With the help of ECOCEAN, Brad Norman, researchers, photographers, and people like you, we have been able to identify over 880 individual whale sharks in and around the Ningaloo Reef. 

You can take part in the research as well by taking a picture of the left side of the whale sharks, just behind their five gill slits. Software developed by NASA scientists  maps the dots and stripes of each individual, much like the program used to map constellations. You can go online to whaleshark.org.au and submit your photographs to ECOCEAN's photo-ID database and they will send you updates when that whale shark is spotted again. You have to have the GPS coordinates though, so be sure to ask your skipper for more information.

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