Sharks that do not bite
Whale or shark? Whale sharks are called whale because of their immense size but they are fish not mammal, sharks that do not bite. Anjani Ganase recalls an encounter with a gentle giant. Even though my job as a marine biologist has allowed me special encounters when working in the ocean environments, the whale shark seemed to be a creature of legends only heard about through chance encounters. Their mystery continued to build in my mind after several occasions of poor timing and missed opportunities where others in the cohort got the opportunity to see what these whale sharks were all about. I resigned to the fact that I probably would never see one, and it was at the moment – as usually happens when you go diving - that I got my first meeting with a whale shark. We were surveying the reefs off Karimunjawa in Indonesia and as we swam along shallow coral reefs, we noticed a wall of fish cruising towards us. The fish were taking advantage of the slipstream of ...