Stuff You Should Know - How Whale Sharks Work

Episode Date: July 30, 2009

Whale sharks are the biggest fish in the ocean. Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss these gentle giants, and recount their experiences swimming with them in the Georgia Aquarium, in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Visit HowStuffWorks.com and search forward thinking to join the movement. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. Chuck, are you falling asleep, 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 went. Right, 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.

See my gams? Yeah. He's very called them. He's good. His legs look like milk bottles. Uh, is that a good thing? They're pretty white. Okay.

Yeah. I thought you meant the curvature. Oh, no. Okay, the whiteness. Although, yeah, now they look at it. Emily slathers me with sunblock, so I'm not allowed to be tan 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 looks like he's afraid of stars or something. He puts on a big old hat and a little surgical mask when he mows the lawn and stuff. Oh, yeah. That'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. 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 on the building at Discovery HQ in Taylor Street? Describing. Well, it's a pretty standard looking building normally, but around the Shark Week time, they have a giant shark head coming out of 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.

You can google that if you're interested in looking at that. I think if you'd like to look up Discovery headquarters, Shark Week, I'm sure you can find pictures. And Chuck and I know a little bit about sharks. We've written tons of articles on them around Shark Week, haven't we? Many, many. And so what they sent out was it's a jar, art directed to look like an old beat up jar that may have washed up on shore, and inside we were surprised to first find a pair of

chewed up beach shorts. Bloody. We found beach shorts. And we've been warned that they were going to smell. They didn't, in fact, smell. Right. They did not. Smell like death or gore.

We got this cool giant shark tooth on a little key chain. We got another little floaty key chain. There's an obit in there. There's an obituary. There's an obituary typed as if it was from an old newspaper of Chief Martin Brody from Jaws fame. And one of our marketing people, Sam Adorno, found that her obit turned up in one of the marketing packages, too.

Right. She was scanning her own death notice on the date of her funeral. Interesting. Yeah. He's pretty cool. Lovely in fetching, Sam Adorno. Sure. And so, yeah, they sent out all the stuff, and basically they sent them to just different

companies and media outlets around the country. But they did it anonymously, right? It was... 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. Yeah. It would have frightened me.

It is pretty cool. But, yeah, it is really cool. Good idea. But it directs you to go to frenziedwaters.com, right? Yeah, that's a new site. And there's some pretty cool stuff on that, thanks in part to our own Mr. Chuck Bryant. Yes. Who helped come up with some aspects of this marketing campaign, didn't you?

Yeah. I mean, what don't you do, Chuck? I do it all, dude. Yeah, you do. You wear many hats, and each one is more fetching than the last. Yeah, I did the fake diary thing from the Shark Attacks of 1916, and I'm really excited that it's an awesome, cool thing to work on. And our sisters-in-arms over at Stuff You Missed in History class, I think they just

recorded one about the Shark Attacks of 1916, which really happened. Yeah, it was a great story. I was a little jealous they got to do that one. Oh, yeah. Is that why you haven't been talking to either of them? I know. I boycotted them. Yeah.

Well, we happened to do something pretty cool recently. Yes. So, back to us. Yeah. It's always about us. And that is that we swam with whale sharks. Among many other types of fish and sharks and skates and rays. Yeah, that man array was huge.

We swam with the man array that was at least the size of me or Chuck. Yeah. I mean, it looked, the wingspan had to be six or eight feet across. It was a big, big boy. Very cool. The big attraction, this was at the Georgia Aquarium, the big attraction, though, is definitely the whale sharks, which were, I think, 16 to, I think, 20 feet was the, the female was 20 feet.

Yeah. And you know what? It was a noticeable difference when that female came by. Mm-hmm. That's the coolest thing I've ever had the opportunity to do. Yeah. So, 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 whale sharks. And this is based on an article on howstuffworks.com that you wrote. Indeed. You are the whale shark expert. You spank me whenever we get into whale shark trivia. I stalk off crying. Which is all the time. Yeah.

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 in the sea. Yeah. And some of these can reportedly grow to over 60 feet, dude. Which is like 20 feet longer than a full-size school bus. Yeah.

Can you imagine seeing one, the largest one we saw the other day, can you imagine one three times that size? Yeah, no. 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. I remember the one right before we got out of the tank.

Yes. I think it was the female. She was swimming right toward me and then dipped right below me. Really? And came within centimeters. Yeah. 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. Right. Because I don't understand how it didn't brush against me. Yeah. A couple of times we had them swim kind of right under us. We didn't do a scuba dive, just so people know we were up top, but with a scuba tank

and mass. And 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 going to smack me on the way by, but it just. It never did. Went right on by. So they're huge and they do appear kind of lumbering, but really they're super graceful. I agree.

Yeah. They're very cool and they're cool looking too. And there were hammerheads in there too. There were. I was a little nervous. The hammerheads were kind of eyeing us. Yeah. They kind of stayed down low though, 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 would see in a little small tank. Sure. But it was 300 pounds. It looked like some land of the lost giant fish. Yeah.

And it was undergoing a sexual transformation like head wig in the angry inch. Right. Apparently when they turn about 25 or so, they go all hermaphrodite and change sex. And apparently it's not a pleasant process. So we had a grumpy grouper in there who's in a tank with different kinds of sharks raised. It was actually the biggest threat to us in that tank. Hard to believe. Yeah.

Like I said, it's the jaw could break your arm if it fit down. 300 pounds of anything can break your arm. So back to the whale shark. 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 odd. It is a little odd.

They were hanging out in the Mediterranean if I was a whale shark. And they're starting to migrate in new and surprising places. Any time they pop up, I was reading an article, they popped up off the coast of Mississippi. Yeah. Louisiana actually. I'm sorry. And some guy who spotted him was a commercial fisherman and they were hanging around and within like several hours or a day, his commercial fishing vessel was suddenly a research vessel.

So all these scientists flew down and chartered his boat and went out there. We took them out there to study them because we know so little about them, 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, our host and shark expert at the aquarium. Yeah.

And Chuck and I aren't immune to the arguments about zoology and keeping animals in captivity or the whole concept of a zoo. You know, I definitely see both sides of the argument. I do too. I know you do too. But Chris Coco was able to produce 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 15 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. Exactly. They don't assume the most whale shark meat of any country in the world as well.

But since that exhibit opened, 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 they were able to show that if you allow a whale shark to live, if you kill a whale shark, in Taiwan, I read that fishermen would get about 10 kilograms a pound or 10 cents a kilogram, that was an odd conversion, 10 cents a kilogram for a whale shark meat, which is kind of substantial, but really not so much. No, not really. In India, they get something like $4,000 a whale shark, 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 at sale once.

Right. And thanks to the burgeoning, 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. Right. Through eco-tourism. True. Right? Because what we did when we swam at the Georgia Aquarium, anybody can do for like, I think

$250 or whatever. $2.25 for a swim and then $3.50 for a full scuba diving. 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 estimated that the annual value of each whale shark is somewhere in the neighborhood of $182,000 or $282,000. And we're talking some of the economies where whale sharks hang out are not the richest

in the world. Right. So they can generate serious income if these local economies can figure out how to really most efficiently shift from whale shark fishing to eco-tourism. Right. And finning. Which is gross. Yeah.

Shark finning, for those you 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. Right. And that's it.

That's the only part they use is the fin. Well, they bleed to death. Yeah. It's awful. And without their fin, they lose any way of navigation. Right. So they're just kind of drifting about and bleeding to death. It's not a nice death.

No. And we should also say too that the whale shark doesn't reach a reproductive age until they think about 25 or 30 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 going to happen, they're not going to have shark bumps. Right. It's a huge, huge impact on the species. Big time because they have up to like two and 300 pups at a time.

So every shark you kill before that age, you're shorting two or 300 potential sharks. Right. And its biggest predator, obviously, is the human. Yeah, absolutely. It's the biggest fish in the sea. There's not a lot of comers to take on a whale shark. Which is funny because they're so peaceful and gentle. They really are.

And their diet is actually really, really light. Yeah. I love that. That's cool. Okay. So they are filter feeders, right? Uh-huh. They generally just eat plankton, which is really tiny, nearly microscopic plant and animal

life. Right. Which is kind of suspended in the ocean. Right. They're also surface dwellers. Right. Which is where the plankton is. Yeah.

And krill too, which are like teeny little shrimps. Uh-huh. And actual little shrimp as well. Yeah. And in captivity, they also love dog food. It looked like. You remember those little brown cubes of nastiness they're feeding? Yeah, that was a gelatin mixture that they made there at the aquarium.

But for their size, you know, they actually don't eat a lot at once, but they eat constantly out in the wild, right? Yep. That's all they do. So they're drifting along with their mouth open pretty much and the plankton goes in. Right. Like a little vacuum. Uh-huh.

And then whatever can't get out of the gills gets stuck there. And what do they do, Chuck? Well, the gills act as like a strainer. Uh-huh. So the water goes out and then they're, the algae and the krill and everything are in the mouth and. Right. Don't they cough?

And they cough it up? Like they hock up a bunch of plankton? Oh yeah. If they, if it's too big, if I think two centimeters, anything over two centimeters, they'll hack back up. Right. And spit out. And I did ask, actually asked Chris at the aquarium, like when you're feeding these

guys, do they, do one of these other fish, because the other fish kind of hang out to try and get little leftovers. Yeah. Remember? Yeah. The other fish accidentally gets sucked in this huge mouth and he said, yeah, that's happened a couple of times and they pretty much cough it back out really quickly. Yeah.

Yeah. And the fish swims out of there. The fish has expelled it about twice the speed it was originally going in. Yeah. I really wanted to see that happen. I did too. Yeah. Because, you know, fish make funny faces when they're scared.

They do. So, uh, we have figured out some stuff about whale sharks, um, just from the, the few studies that have been able to be conducted. Uh, I read an estimate, Chuck, that there was like 500,000 and estimated 500,000 in the wild, which is really, really low. Yeah. Um, especially considering that millions of sharks are killed each year recreationally. Millions, dude.

Millions. The highest estimate I saw was 100 million. The, the median I think was about 30 million. Sad. But yeah, if there's 500,000 of you and people are indiscriminately killing sharks and you're in trouble. Well, they're listed as vulnerable by the world conservation union, so that's no good. But what we have figured out, um, for a long time they thought that, uh, whale sharks actually

laid eggs, right? Yeah. Which is not the case. No, they have pups. They do. Um, I think in 1995, a female whale shark was killed and they cut her open and, uh, found 300 whale shark pups in her belly. 16 to 24 inches.

I bet that is one of the cutest things you've ever seen. Dead whale shark pups? Well, it's, yeah, I forgot about the fact that they were dead. That sounded pretty insensitive. I would just say like a two foot whale shark pup would be really cute, alive. I'm sure, because they're pretty cute at 20 feet. They are. Yeah.

Uh, they, they have, um, their mouths are at the front of their face. Right. Not under there. It's unusual for a shark. Yeah. They're usually under it. And it's just this big, wide, narrow, gaping maw. Yeah.

A big square head, really. And their eyes are real tiny and kind of on the side and they 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, uh, fish in the wild is called a soft encounter. Yeah.

So basically you want to be a, uh, you want to watch. You don't want to be a participant. No. Well, anytime they got nearest, we had to lay flat and still and just let them pass by and let them check us out. Uh huh. Pretty cool. Yeah.

I think that's certainly 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 a super soft encounter. But even our producer, Jerry, got in on that one. Yes. Uh, you can also swim with humpback whales. That's pretty popular. Um, in the Dominican Republic and the South Pacific Island of Tonga, you can swim with

humpback whales. Uh huh. 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. I don't know why it's soft encounter cracks me up so much. It is kind of funny.

Yeah. Um, and that's a donsel Philippines. Right. Right. They were really the kind of the first to get on board with the soft encounter ecotourism thing. Right. Um, and they've kind of provided a model for everybody else.

Yeah. Absolutely. You know, another, uh, 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, Finn 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 going to do the flipper thing and hang on and take a little ride. Plus also they're deadly, deadly creatures.

Finally. They hate humans. Dolphins? Sure. No. I thought they liked people. You're Josh. 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 stingrays, uh, and seals here and there. Like in the UK, you can swim with seals. But there is another side to this, which, uh, a lot of, uh, wildlife experts kind of decry this whole practice and they say you shouldn't be able to do this at SeaWorld. 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. Yeah, definitely. I mean, think about it. We're all pretty much lousy with swine flu these days. You don't need to bring 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 poorer. You know, they're not like, uh, swimming off the coast of, uh, Ibiza 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 ecotourism versus the butchering of sharks? Well, no, no, no. I mean, just period, like, should they be completely left alone or should the stuff be allowed? I'm curious. Cause 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, the other problem is 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 a seal or something like that. Right. 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. Yeah. And if you're a coastal economy, you're going to make money off of the sea. Right. Are you going to make money off of the sea through conservation that ecotourism can provide? Or are you going to do it by catching and killing whale sharks for their fins? Well, 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 and budding, uh, economic sector, right, 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 in. I agree. Yeah. That's, that's my final judgment. What I want to do now is, uh, and I know I kept you because you were scuba certified.

I apologize again. Don't worry about it. Okay. 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, uh, I wanted to get down there

with the sharks and the hammerhead 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 that day. Totally wiped. Yep. Totally wiped out. And it wasn't just the bacon cheeseburger and chicken fingers we each had for lunch afterward. It was definitely the, the compressed air has an effect, but it's still a pretty cool

hobby. I'll be it probably the most expensive one around aside from maybe private piloting. Yeah. I would say that's expensive too. I got one more thing for the whale sharks for you. What's it got? So, uh, India is a huge, um, whale shark fishing capital. Okay.

And, uh, there was a holy man named, um, Murari Bapu, who a couple of years back, uh, was visiting Varival, 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, uh, bustling whale shark capital suddenly whale shark fishing dropped off. Completely. And the, 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. Really? Yeah. Huh. Yeah. So maybe we could get Al Gore in a robe or something.

Yeah. Or just wander around too. 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 Bapu. Thank you.

Thanks for the soft encounter with him. That's it for whale sharks. And we would like to go ahead and tell you to head on over to frenziedwaters.com that has Mr. Chuck Bryant and some of our other staffers from howstuffworks.com's work, um, on that site. You can also check out sharkweek.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 2nd to 8th.

Yeah. And watch Blood in the Water. That's the show they did about the, uh, 1916 attacks in New Jersey. It's really cool. I watched it. Oh yeah? Yeah. Yeah.

It's good. And if you want to see the picture of Joshers and I with the whale sharks, I've put one up in the blog. Yeah. What was the name of the post? I believe it was, uh, Josh and Chuck's swim with sharks. It's appropriate Lena. Yes.

I should have been Josh and Chuck have soft encounter, but that would have been a different picture altogether. Yeah. You can find that. You can find some really nice articles that Chuck Bryant wrote on sharks in general on HowStuffWorks.com. And Molly Edmonds. She wrote a lot of them.

Sure. So did Toothman. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, you can find those on HowStuffWorks.com. And since I just said that word together, that means it's time for listener mail. Right. Okay Josh, I'm just going to call this one, uh, Toxo Listener Mail.

And I knew, dude, that when we did the Toxoplasmosis, that we would have one person that says, I've got it, and here's what it's like. Well, technically 80% of the people who write in should say that they have it. Yeah. But this guy, like, just let me read it to you. This is from, uh, Josh. Oh, is this my life as a Toxofetus? Yeah.

Okay. Uh, just listening 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 stillborn 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 yee-haw. 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 suppose the takeaway from your listener is, if you're a pregnant woman with Toxoplasmosis, don't give up hope because your baby just might pull through and have a head after all. According 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 diagnose myself as schizophrenic. The two of my other personalities would disagree. Josh is a funny guy.

Hey Josh. I very much enjoyed the podcast and hope you're both enjoying the Georgian summer heat. We are not, in fact, Josh at all. Yeah, that was from Josh. He's a nasty here. He 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 from what I understand, it's just a simple blood test and check for antibodies that developed to ward off the Toxoplasmatic cysts. It's your local CVS under the Toxoplasmosis isle. Right. Not true. Or at Jimmy's bait shop and blood test galore.

Right. He serves up live bait, Toxoplasmosis test, and espresso. Have you seen that place indicator that it says live bait, pets, taxes? Really? Yeah. Interesting. They sell live bait and do taxes. Right.

It's pretty cool. And make you an espresso. 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 StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. As 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 HowStuffWorks.com and search forward thinking to find out more. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Thank you.