What Do Whale Sharks Do When Nobody's Watching?

Professor Pip knelt on the warm wooden dock, humming to himself. Beside him on a little red wagon sat a big polka-dotted plush whale shark he'd nicknamed Marlow. In one paw, Pip held a tiny brass gadget the size of a walnut. In the other, a small clip.

"Behold!" he announced, holding the gadget up so his crooked spectacles caught the sunlight. "A miniature science camera."

"For MARLOW?" asked Mia, eyes wide.

"For Marlow's pretend cousins," said Pip. "The BIGGEST fish in the whole ocean."

"Whale sharks aren't whales, right?" said Leo, sitting cross-legged.

"Precisely! They're sharks — but they can grow longer than a school bus, and they don't have teeth like a shark movie. They swim gently along, filtering little shrimp called krill right out of the water."

He carefully clipped the tiny camera to Marlow's dorsal fin. CLICK. "Now — the puzzle. Scientists could always watch whale sharks from a boat, but only at the very top of the water. What happened when the sharks dove down? Nobody knew!"

Mia gasped. "So they gave the SHARK the camera!"

"Exactly right!" said Pip, tail curling with delight. "A little device that records data on an animal is called a biologger. In Australia, near a beautiful place called Ningaloo Reef, a team clipped these camera tags on wild whale sharks. Twenty-four hours later — plink — the clips popped off, floated to the surface, and the scientists picked them up."

He held an old wooden picture frame in front of Marlow's snout. "Now imagine looking THROUGH here…"

Leo squinted through it. "I can pretend to see fish! And bubbles! And sunlight beams in the water!"

"That's what the shark's camera saw," said Pip. "And here's the surprise. Scientists thought whale sharks mostly ate at the surface, gulping. WRONG! The footage showed them feeding down to 70 meters — about 230 feet — and doing it in 36 different ways. Some of those ways look almost lazy. Just cruising with their giant mouths open, catching a snack here, a snack there."

"Oh!" said Mia. "Like when I walk past the fruit bowl and grab a grape without even stopping!"

"Curiouser and curiouser!" giggled Pip. "That's exactly what one scientist called it — like snacking from the pantry."

He gazed out at the shimmering lagoon and adjusted his spectacles. "There is so much of the ocean we simply cannot follow. But when we ask the animals to bring the camera along… oh my whiskers, the stories they tell us."

He handed the kids each a paper-plate "camera." "Now you try. Follow a squirrel or a bug in your yard, and imagine what it would film if it could see the world."