Whale Sharks - The 'Inside' Story

Ali's blogging from the American Cetacean Society conference this week, but that doesn't mean there aren't other important cetacean (or, in this case, cetacean-like) stories happening around the world. And it's our duty at Sea Notes duty to bring them to your attention!

So here's the scoop from the BBC: Rare video footage of a whale shark caught in the act of pooping -- and and the important clues that DNA analysis of the poop provided between a critical food resource and a whale shark migration to the waters off Australia's Christmas Island, a national park in Western Australia.

There's a bit of British tongue-in-cheek coverage of the story in the Daily Telegraph, but don't let that obscure the importance of what researchers have learned. Using a combination of tracking tags, computerized video and data recorders, aerial observations and shipboard tracking, the research team documented whale shark travels that they believe are linked to the occurrence of specific food sources in the Indian Ocean. In the case of Christmas Island, that means red crabs, whose DNA appeared in abundance in the samples collected after the whale shark pooped them out.

These land crabs make an annual migration to spawn in the ocean, and the whale sharks seem to be timing their migrations to take advantage of the larval bounty.

The footage is part of the program Whale Shark, airing on BBC2 as part of the 25th anniversary season of Natural World. And the science, stinky though it is, may be critical to assuring a future with whale sharks.

As marine biologist Dr. Mark Meekan of the Australian Institute of Marine Science told The Telegraph: "You've got an animal that hasn't changed basically since the age of the dinosaurs. Over the last 10 years the size of whale sharks has declined by about two meters. That's a lot. And it's alarming because it's a classic symptom of overfishing."

His work could offer important clues explaining whale shark migrations, and where they need protection in the wild.

A whale (shark) of a story, I'd say.