If you’re excited about upcoming monster fest Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, then this giant basking shark should get you seriously revved up.
https://gizmodo.com/mega-shark-versus-giant-octopus-noms-on-san-francisco-5241733
At 33 feet long, the basking shark is one of the biggest sharks in the oceans (the biggest is the whale shark). Unlike its toothy brethren, however, it prefers a whale’s diet of plankton. It needs that mega-mouth to filter through thousands of gallons of water for yummy microscopic proteins.
Until recently, the basking shark was also shrouded in mystery. For large parts of the year, they disappeared from their usual haunts, sank deep beneath the water, and seemed to disappear. Now scientists have used a new shark tracking system to figure out that they spend their summer months in the Caribbean and off the coast of Brazil.
According to Wired:
Like most large fish, they’re difficult to keep track of because they rarely come to the surface, where tags need to be to transmit information to satellites. Skomal got around this hurdle by harpooning the fish with special tags that tracked and stored depth, temperature and light level, which then popped off at a pre-programmed date and rose to the surface. Once a tag hits the surface, it transmits the entire archive of the fish’s journey via satellite. Skomal used a novel analysis technique that could determine the sharks’ locations at every time point, allowing him to retrospectively track them to their secret hiding places.
He found the sharks were traveling well-outside their known range, spending months in the warm waters of the Caribbean and even deep into the southern hemisphere. They also periodically dove to more than 3,000 feet, and often stayed at those depths for months at a time. One shark remained at a depth of nearly 600 feet for upward of five months.
Find out more about these mega sharks at Wired.
Images, from top to bottom, by Chris Gotshalk, Nick Caloyianis and Gregory Skomal.
