The whale shark

The whale shark is the biggest shark in the world the biggest one recorded was found in Karachi, Pakistan it was 12.65M and it weighed over 21.5 tonnes. Its mouth can be up to 1.5 M wide and can contain 300 to 350 rows of tiny teeth. It has 5 large pairs of gills and its two small eyes are located at the front of its long flat head. The whale shark is mostly grey with a white belly its skin is marked with a ''checkerboard'' of yellow spots and stripes and its skin can be up to 10cm thick. The whale shark is found around coastal areas such as Ningaloo Reef in W.A, Utila in Honduras, Donsol and Batangas in the Philippines and Tanzanian Islands of Pemba and Zanzibar. They inhabit in the worlds tropical and warm temperate oceans and they are also rarely seen in groups. The whale shark has a filter feeder it is only one of the three sharks in the world that has it. It feeds on phytoplankton, macro-algae, plankton, krill and small nektonic life such as squid or vertebrates. The whale shark had been threatened from people like fisherman and commercial fisheries where they used to sell them and that was banned in the Philippines in 1998 and then in Taiwan in 2007. Some of the ways that we could stop the whale sharks numbers decreasing is that you could stop harpooning and big fishing companies and stop getting them for there skin and get rid of all the fishing nets. They could make sanctuary for all the whale sharks to keep them safe and so they can mate and increase the numbers again. The whale shark reproduces by the female laying the eggs on the sea floor and the male comes and fertilize them with his sperm (oviparous). The whale shark female keeps the eggs inside her body until the baby hatches.(viviparous)