“We don’t see whale sharks that often, but their tissues hold a remarkable record of what they’ve been up to. We’re now learning how to read this library.”
Algae has turned up before in the stomachs of beached whale sharks. But because of how whale sharks feed — by swimming mouth-open through swarms of zooplankton — “everyone though it was just accidental ingestion,” Meekan says. Carnivores typically can’t digest plant life, so some scientists suspected that algae passed through whale sharks’ guts without being digested.
Meekan says most whale sharks don’t react when they get jabbed by the spear, which is roughly the width of a pinky finger. Some even seem to enjoy attention from researchers, he says. It’s as though they think: “This isn’t threatening. In fact, I quite like that.” But that doesn’t mean that whale sharks are true omnivores, says shark biologist Robert Hueter of Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida. “Whale sharks take in a lot of other things than the food they’re targeting,” he says. “This is a bit like saying that cows are omnivores because they eat insects while feeding on grass.”
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