Endangered
Whale shark
Rhincodon typus
The whale shark is a slow-moving, filter-feeding carpet shark and the largest known extant fish species.
Appearance
Their skin is dark grey with a white belly marked with an arrangement of pale grey or white spots and stripes that is unique to each individual. The caudal fin has a larger upper lobe than the lower lobe (heterocercal). The shark can process over 6,000 liters of water per hour through its specialized sieve-like gill pads.
The skin can be up to 15 cm (5.9 in) thick and is very hard and rough to the touch. An individual with a length of 18.8 m (61.7 ft) has been considered the largest reliably recorded.
Published measurements include mass about 12 and length about 46.
An extinct species, Rhincodon ferriolensis, was described in Europe (probably in Spain), in the Late Burdigalian stage.
Range and habitat
The whale shark inhabits all tropical and warm-temperate seas. The fish is primarily pelagic, and can be found in both coastal and oceanic habitats. Tracking devices have shown that the whale shark displays dynamic patterns of habitat utilization, likely in response to availability of prey.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It also feeds on clouds of eggs during mass spawning of fish and corals. Highly migratory, the whale shark travels thousands of miles across tropical oceans to exploit seasonal food sources, with large, predictable feeding aggregations occurring at coastal sites such as Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia, the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and off the coast of Gujarat and Kerala in India.
In crisis
Despite its immense size, the whale shark is docile and poses no significant threat to humans. It is currently listed as an Endangered species on the IUCN Red List owing to a population decline of more than 50% over the last 75 years, primarily as a result of targeted fishing, bycatch in other fisheries, and collisions with large ships. Over the past 75 years, the global whale shark population has decreased by about 50%, with declines of approximately 63% in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and over 30% in the Atlantic Ocean.
This decline is attributed to threats such as fishing bycatch, vessel strikes, and pollution. Consequently, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has listed the whale shark as an endangered species.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Whale shark is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Whale shark, Wikidata item Q80378. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
