08 Feb, 2008

The world’s largest fish moves deceptively quickly. We follow an individual whale shark heading south, down the eastern coast of Southern Africa.

A friend who flies along the coast south of Durban told me he’d been seeing an unusual number of whale sharks from the air recently, and I decided to see if I could locate one or two of these huge creatures from the boat.

I drove the inshore corridor off Rocky Bay and Park Rynie, an area that I know is well used by whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) during their lazy but purposeful migrations up and down this coast.

We’d covered a few kilometres before the tell-tale dark shape appeared, moving beneath in the water.

The particular animal that we crossed paths with today was a little jumpy, which surprised me until I noticed a fairly bad wound above the left gill plates. This creature had obviously been injured before, and was now shy and nervous. As you can see in the video clip, the injury has healed completely, but left substantial scarring.

These interactions are always brief. Whale sharks are deceptively swift in their sub-marine trawling, and keeping up with them is tiring.

We let this one disappear into the haze without using the boat to track it.

– by Graeme Duane, Earth-Touch crew © Earth-Touch

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