Whale sharks are world’s biggest fishes. These are having big mouths, but they are not swallowing people. These are plankton feeders.
You may wonder why this fish is called a whale shark. Scientists have determined that it is a species of shark, because of skeleton and its tough, leathery, scale less skin. People called it a whale shark because of its enormous size like a whale, not because it is a type of whale.
A whale is a mammal, a warm-blooded creature that has lungs and breathes air, gives births to its young onces and nurses them with milk produced by mammary glands. A shark is a fish its ‘breathes’ oxygen by passing water over it gills.
Whale sharks are rare, elusive creatures. One interesting adaptation of the whale shark that scientists have discovered is that it has sensors that run the length of its body, which are used for detecting pressure changes in the surrounding water.
Whale sharks swim with their huge mouths wide open to chow down, making it hard for their proportionately small eyes to see where they are going.
Planktons are microscopically tiny organisms that thrive in the oceans throughout the world. The huge, gaping mouth is the while sharks adaptation to feeding plankton. The wider huge mouth opens the more plankton he can scoop up with each bite. All the water that he takes in toe scoops up his meal is simply passed out of his body through his gills, which have sieve like membranes covering them into filter out the little critters and prevent them from escaping.
If you were accidentally scooped by the whale shark you would find yourself being spit back out through and interesting process call gastric eversion. The whale shark actually turns its stomach inside out and spits out through its mouth, ejecting the entire contents.-
