Whale Sharks

This morning, while perusing an email newsletter that mentioned Google Earth, I stumbled onto an article describing a whale shark’s being tracked via Google Earth, it’s swimming trail in the Indian Ocean being viewable via a download.
That download can be viewed at http://www.seeadlerpost.com/. But that’s not today’s FamilyFirst site.
Instead, it is an excellently informative article on the huge gentle giants presented by the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The article goes into great detail on this amazing fish. The whale shark typically is found in equatorial waters worldwide, and, as the Google Earth image shows, they travel vast distances.
Moving at a stalwart three miles per hour, they periodically open their huge mouths and suck in seawater and plankton, then close their mouths and force the water past their gill filaments which efficiently filter the solids. All that is left is scarfing them down.
I was surprised to learn that whale sharks possess teeth that look much like classic shark teeth, although they are small in comparison with their meat-eating relatives.
There are some amazing photos of the sharks to be seen here, too.
So enjoy today’s FamilyFirst peek at a huge, harmless creature that is unfortunately being adversely affected by man, as are most of the world’s species.
Click here