Jamestown, St. Helena – Whale sharks should not be difficult to find for scientists. They are huge: they are the largest fish of the sea and perhaps the greatest fish they have ever lived. They are found in warm oceans around the world. According to shark standards, they are slow swimmers.
But they somehow We also manage to be very private: Scientists do not know where they mate, and they have never observed it before.
However, they finally have some clues. Scientists suspect that magic can be happening in the waters around Santa Helenaa remote volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean where Napoleon Bonaparte He was once exiled and died. It is the only place in the world where it is known that sharks of male and female adult whales gather regularly in an approximately equal number, and food does not seem to be the main attraction.
Kenickie Andrews, the Manager of the St. Helena Trust Marine Conservation Project, says she has seen male sharks chasing females, bordering on her pectoral fins and “showing” female sharks, similar to the mating rituals observed in other sharks, including large white ones.
“What we have seen here is the classic shark courtness behavior,” he said. “To this day, we have not seen a successful intercourse, but it is a test (whale sharks) are in our waters that try these behaviors.”
Whale sharks generally measure 12 to 18 meters (39 to 59 feet), weigh up to 14 tons and are plankton dining rooms; All sharks have a unique pattern of white spots on their upper side.
Scientists say they need to know where the sharks are mating and giving birth to those areas, possibly creating marine reserves where threats such as fishing are prohibited. Whale sharks are designated as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; The group says that its population has been “exhausted.”
Simon Pierce, who has studied whale sharks worldwide, said he has photographed alleged mating scars in female sharks in St. Helena, probably since when male sharks bit their pectoral fins to cling to them and reach the mating position.
The alleged leading behavior of whale sharks in Australia and sharks are also reported in places like Mexico, the Arabian Sea and the Maldives, but that seems to be equivalent to male harassment of immature females, explains Pierce, executive and co -founder director of the Megafauna Foundation of Marine Charity. That is not the case in Santa Helena, where adult men and adult women are present.
Fishing experts in St. Helena have also provided stories of eyewitnesses of what they said were cases of mating whale sharks. The authorities described a lot of beating on the surface of the water by two huge sharks playing the belly to the belly, but those sightings were not captured in video and the scientists do not consider a sufficient test.
Cameron Perry, a research scientist at Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, has been working with colleagues on the island to attach camera labels to investigate what the sharks are doing whales, but they have encountered some technical difficulties: sharks submerge more than 2,000 meters (6,561 feet) and the labels cannot resist the pressure.
“We have a very tempting and mocking video,” said Perry. “We have two sharks about to make contact, and then our camera falls.”
Perry is not sure of what sharks could be doing well below the surface, but expects a new technology to develop to answer that question. “It’s just a number of numbers in terms of how often we can enter the water.”
Alistair Dove, who previously conducted research in Santa Helena, said he has seen male whales sharks requesting contact from adult women’s sharks, including the rotation of his classpers or sexual organs, in what he said was “the equivalent of shark of an erection.”
“These sexual behaviors are very, very rare in whale sharks,” said Dove, now CEO of the Science Museum AND History in Jacksonville, Florida.
“This is one of the huge unanswered questions about the largest fish in the world,” said Dove.
Andrews, by St. Helena Trust, said she was hope that someone could capture video evidence of the mate of whale sharks, but acknowledged that the presence and stresses of labeling of the researchers could inadvertently alter the shark mating practices.
“Maybe they don’t want to be seen,” he said. “Maybe, like everyone else, they need privacy.”
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