“Dude, quit cramping my style.” Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Although whale sharks are very well studied, their sex lives have been a bit of a mystery. But the courtship rituals they practice might be a little more understood after researchers saw a male and a female doing what looked a lot like flirting.
Humans have only ever documented one pregnant whale shark. There are two places where researchers think that they’ve seen what could be mating rituals; the first in the Saint Helena Islands in the Atlantic Ocean and the second at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia.
“At Ningaloo Reef, and many aggregation sites around the world, males outnumber females with a ratio of one female to three males,” said Christine Barry, the study co-author and a PhD candidate from Murdoch University’s Harry Butler Institute and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. “This could explain why female whale sharks may be avoiding aggregation sites. Particularly for juvenile female sharks, the energetic costs of unwanted attention from males could imply a reason for strong male biases.”
To find the whale sharks, scientists looked for them from planes, then directed nearby boats to the area. Then a team of divers hit the water to get an up-close-and-personal look. In mid May, they found a female whale shark measuring nearly 23 feet long. Although that does sound big, whale sharks less than around 33 feet are generally thought not to be sexually mature. This time, however, a male whale shark swam up behind her, then bit at her tail. Soon after, they disappeared into the inky depths.
Because whale sharks are close relatives of zebra sharks, the researchers took note of that behavior. Zebra sharks do the same thing before mating, so it’s likely that whale sharks do too.
Although researchers do believe that what they observed was some kind of pre-mating behavior, they don’t think it’s likely that the encounter led to a pregnancy because the female was too small. Still, though, it gives us another piece of a puzzle that has been eluding us for a long time.
