holmbergius

http://www.whaleshark.org/individuals.jsp?number=BZ-014

OK, now how do I email everyone on Reddit when this whale shark shows up again?

I can give you a few!

We have never recorded birth. We don't even know where it happens!

We have never recorded mating. We don't know where and when it happens, and whale sharks have some clearly segregated migration routes. For example, large, potentially pregnant females seem to appear with no males in the Fall off the Galapagos Islands. Where they come from and where they go to give birth is a complete mystery!

Whale sharks < 4 meters are rarely sighted (maybe once or twice per year), despite the fact that a large female can give birth to 300+.

We simply don't know where the pups and nurseries are.

I saw my first whale shark off the coast of Djibouti in 2002. I was just a diver, and we saw an 8 foot juvenile. I was amazed at its beauty, and I noticed the spot patterning on the side and how it appeared somewhat random. I had spare time on my hands, and so I began working on a pattern recognition system to map their spots into a database, much like a human fingerprint. Eventually, I teamed up with a colleague at NASA (Zaven Arzoumanian, pulsar astronomer), and we found a software algorithm developed for matching star patterns in pictures of the night sky. It turns out that matching photos of stars is much the same as matching photos of the spot patterns of whale sharks, and we modified the algorithm to become a new way of tagging whale sharks with high accuracy over long time periods.

They can dive to several thousand feet several times per day, but we don't know how deep. 1280m is the record so far, but that was when the archiving tag (placed by Dr. Simon Pierce) ejected itself to avoid being crushed at depth.