Stalking, love bites, and getting into position

Even the biggest fish in the sea have their secrets, but now, scientists have captured rare footage of whale shark courtship behaviors, offering new insights into the bewildering sex lives of these giants.

The video was taken in May 2024. Researchers entered the water after receiving a report from a surveillance plane that had seen a female whale shark in the 131-foot-deep (40-meter) water off Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. Shortly after sampling that shark, a male whale shark came along, and the research team captured video footage of the sharks’ interactions. It was the team’s research published This month in Frontiers in marine science.

Whale sharks (Rincodone Typographic writing) are elasmobranchs – a group of cartilaginous fish that includes sharks, rays, skates, and sawfish. Whale sharks are also the largest fish in the world, typically measuring about 30 feet (9 m) in length. According to the American Museum of Natural History, one The largest whale sharks ever It was approximately 61.67 feet (18.8 m) long. The largest known whale shark egg was found in 1953, and was about a foot (0.3 m) long.

The animal’s mating behaviors remain somewhat mysterious, with courtship having only been observed off the St. Helena Islands and at Ningaloo Reef.

At Ningaloo – a spectacle of behavior recently described – male whale sharks outnumber females by three to one, based on data collected from more than 1,000 sharks in the area in the past decade.

Sharks have been observed off St. Helena Island adopting a belly-to-belly position, although the recent encounter did not go that far. In the May 2024 event, the team observed the male shark following the female and lunging several times at her.

“The male shark increased its swimming speed and again lunged towards the female’s caudal fin, this time making contact and briefly biting the tail,” the team reported. “The female responded by quickly pivoting with her pectoral fins pointed downward to face the male.”

But the final pair was not made in heaven. The female moved away from the male and “quickly descended into the depths.” The team stated that the behaviors they observed “do not appear to have led to successful mating,” although it is possible that the two sharks were paired in deeper waters. The team concluded that the female they observed was probably not sexually mature based on its size.

Whale sharks are Endangered species. According to the AMNH, the population of this species may have declined by 50% over the past 75 years. Whales are illegally hunted for their meat, caught as bycatch, and their habitats are damaged by oil spills, plastic pollution, human shipping and tourist activity.

The latest video shows that despite the many threats, the giant fish is still out there, but perhaps not for this particular couple. Love is in the air – meaning water – for whale sharks, and scientists have captured it on camera.