"This is equivalent to finding polar bears in Kansas"

The internet is a buzz with this recent discovery about basking sharks. From the discovery channel:

"In the western Atlantic, the world's second largest fish swims all the way from New England to the Bahamas and across the equator to South America, a new study finds. Scientists have long thought that basking sharks spent all of their time in cooler waters.
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Basking sharks have long been shrouded in mystery. These fish, which can measure 35 feet or longer, are known to live in temperate waters around the world. Yet, no one has ever examined a newborn basking shark. No one has seen a pregnant female. No one knows where the animals give birth.

And until recently, no one knew where they spent much of their time, particularly in the winter.

To learn more, Skomal and colleagues attached a new type of satellite tracking tag to 25 basking sharks off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass. Once each tag was attached to a shark, it collected data on depth, temperature and light levels for a preprogrammed amount of time -- from 12 days to more than a year. When its time was up, the device popped off the animal and sent its data back to the researchers.

Tags came off in a wide range of locations, the scientists reported today in the journal Current Biology, from New England to the coast of Brazil in the Southern Hemisphere. Other locations included the Sargasso Sea, the Puerto Rico Trench, and the Guyana coast.

Five sharks traveled more than 2,400 kilometers (nearly 1,500 miles). One spent a month hanging out near the mouth of the Amazon River.

A closer look at data from six sharks showed that the animals traveled at depths of between 200 meters (650 feet) and 1,000 meters (3,300 feet). Some stayed at those levels for up to five months. The animals appeared to seek out water in an ideal temperature range. "

Wired also wrote up an article on this discovery which is where I got these pictures. They had a few interesting quotes:

"The basking shark is a benign behemoth. It swims at about three miles per hour with its four-foot-wide mouth gaping open, filtering through almost 500,000 gallons of water every hour for its plankton sustenance.

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The extended range of the sharks suggests that the different Atlantic subpopulations — near the east and west coasts of both hemispheres — may actually be the same population.

“They might even be crossing into other oceans,” he said, “meaning there might actually be one population in the entire world.”

This possibility has implications for conservation biologists. The sharks are currently listed as “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, due to the high value of their fins which are the key ingredient for shark fin soup, a tasteless but symbolic Chinese delicacy. The sharks’ livers, which can make up 25 percent of their total body weight, also fetch a high price for their oil.

“This tells us that if we allow sharks off British Columbia to be harvested, we might be impacting the entire population,” said Skomal. “We can’t just save the fish off of New England, we have to coordinate with all the fisheries. We have to divide up the pie instead of each having our own pie.”"

So humans, give the basking sharks a break, they are harmless and rare creatures of the deep. Boy would I love to dive with a basking shark, that would be the coolest thing ever. I did run into this video clip about a massive aquarium in Georgia that allows the public to come swim and dive in it. At first glance its kinda lame, diving in an aquarium? But considering its in Georgia, which doesn't have good diving to my understanding, and considering they have whale sharks in there, I think its a pretty cool concept. You can see whale sharks diving in the Caribbean, but they very rare. Note, basking sharks are different from whale sharks although both are gigantic and completely harmless to humans. More on whale sharks in this video.