July 30, 2009 • 27 mins
Whale sharks are the biggest fish in the ocean. Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss these gentle giants, and recount their experiences swimming with them in the Georgia Aquarium, in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from how stuff works dot Com. The future of our
planet depends on the forward thinkers among us. Green technology,
the power of community, and the future of our planet
(00:22):
are things we can change together. Visit how stuff works
dot com and search Forward Thinking to join the movement. Hi,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. Chuck,
are you falling sleep? Buddy? Meditating? It's the morning. This
is not our usual time to record, so I'm very
curious to see just how much worse than usual this
(00:44):
one through. But it is Friday morning, is it? You
know me? I'm big on the Friday recording. It's Friday
short stay again. I know Chuck looks like a straight
up summer babe, ye call them, but his legs look
like milk bottles. A good thing. Pretty white Okay, Yeah
I thought you meant the curvature. Okay, the white notes.
(01:06):
So yeah, no, they look at it. It only slathers
me with some block because I'm not allowed to beatan anymore.
Do you have to wear like one of those big
sun hats when you go out. I do. My dad
dresses like that. He dresses like he's afraid of stars
or something. He puts on a big old hat and
a little surgical mask the lawn and oh yeah, it's awesome.
He gets very androgynous when he's mowing the lawn. Okay,
(01:27):
it's weird, Chuck. We got a package recently that I
would like you to describe, Josh. This is Dare I say,
one of the cooler promotional items I've ever seen from
a company. Agreed, Yeah, this is from our parent company, Discovery.
And what they did was they sent out to promote
their Shark Week, which, as everyone knows, is huge. It is.
(01:50):
Have you ever seen the shark gun the building at
a Discovery HQ and describing, Well, it's a pretty standard
looking building normally, but around Shark Week time they have
a giant shark head coming on the building on one
side and a giant shark tail coming out on the
other and I suspect a giant shark fin coming out
(02:10):
of the top and on the sides. It looks awesome.
It's pretty cool. Actually, you can google that if you're
interested in looking at that. I think if you like
to look up Discovery headquarters Shark weeken shore, you can
find pictures and talking. I know a little bit about sharks.
We've written tons of articles on him around Shark Week,
many many, And so what they sent out was it's
a jar art directed to look like an old beat
(02:33):
up jar short that may have washed up on shore.
And inside we were surprised to first find a pair
of chewed up beat shorts, bloody, blood stained beat shorts.
And we've been warned that they were gonna smell. They
didn't in fact smell right, They did not smell like
death or gore. We got this cool giant shark tooth
with a on a little key chain. We got another
(02:56):
little another little floaty keychain with is an O bit
in there the obituaries, an obituary type as if it
was from an old newspaper of Chief Martin Brody from
Jaws Fame. And one of our marketing people, sam A Dorno,
found that her O bit turned up in one of
the marketing packages to scanning her own death notice on
(03:20):
the date of her funeral. Interesting, yeah, he's lovely in fetching,
sam A Dorna, and uh so, yeah, they sent out
all this stuff and basically it's they sent him to
just different companies and media outlets around the country. They
did it anonymously, right it was. That's yeah, that's the
trick is you don't really know what it is. You
just get this suspicious package that I never would have
opened had I not known where it was from, to
(03:40):
be honest, it would have frightened me. It is pretty cool,
but yeah, it is really cool, good idea, but it
directs you to go to frenzied waters dot com, right, yeah,
and the cool stuff on that thanks in part to
our own Mr Chuck Bryant, who helped come up with
some aspects of this marketing campaign. Didn't you. I mean,
what don't you do, Chuck? I do it all due,
Yeah you do. You wear many hats and each one
(04:02):
is more fetching than the last. Yeah. I did the
the fake diary thing from the shark attacks of nineteen sixteen,
and I'm really excited. It's it's an awesome, cool thing
to work on. And our our sisters in arms over
at us Stuffy missed in history class. I think they
just recorded one, right, um, the shark attacks of nineteen sixteen,
which really happened. Yeah, it was a great story. I
(04:24):
was a little jealous I got to do that one.
But is that why you haven't been talking to either
of them? I know I've boycotted them. Yeah. Well we
happen to do something pretty cool recently, So back to us. Yeah,
it's always about us, um and uh, that is that
we swam with whale sharks, among many other types of
fish and sharks and skates and rays. Yeah, that manor
(04:46):
ray was huge. We we swam with the manaray that
was at least the size of me yr Chuck. Yeah,
I mean it looked the wingspan had to be, uh
six or eight feet across. It was a big, big boy.
Very cool. The big attraction this is at the Georgia Aquium,
the bigger track and those definitely the whale sharks, which
were I think sixteen two I think was the female was. Yeah,
(05:08):
and you know what that was. It was a noticeable
difference when that female came by. That's the coolest thing
I've ever had the opportunity to do. Yeah, so let's
let's talk about whale sharks. We'll talk about swimming with
them a little more in a little more detail. But
Chuck tell me about whales sharks. And this is based
on an article on how stuff works dot com that
you wrote. Indeed, you are the whale shark expert. You
(05:29):
spank me whenever we get into whale shark trivia and
I stalk off crime, which is all the time. Yeah.
Uh yeah, let's talk about the whale shark. Everyone knows
that it is the largest fish in the sea. I
didn't know that, which also makes it the largest shark
h in the sea. And some of these can reportedly
grow to over sixty feet dude, which is like twenty
(05:50):
ft longer than a full size school bus. Can you
imagine seeing one the largest one we saw the other day?
Can you imagine one three times that size? Yeah? I
can't either. No, I mean it's just mammoth. One of
the other things that I noticed when we were swimming
with them that I just found amazing. You remember the
one right before we got out of the tank. Yes,
I think it was the female. She was swimming right
towards me and then dipped right below me and came
(06:13):
within centimeters touching me, But at no point did she
touch me, So they apparently have some really great sense
of kinetics. Yeah, knowing exactly where every part of their
body is in relation to other things, because I don't
understand how it didn't brush against me. Yeah, we have
a couple of times we had him swim kind of
right under us. We were we didn't do a scuba dive,
(06:35):
which just so people know we're up up top, but
with a scuba tank and mask, and they would they
swam right under us, and I turned around to look
and I would see that big tail coming at me,
the big dorsal fin, and I just knew it was
gonna smack me on the way by, but it just
it never did went right on. So they're huge, and
they do appear kind of lumbering, but really they're super graceful. Yeah,
they're very cool. And they're cool looking too. And there
(06:57):
were hammer heads in there too, There were I was
a little nervous hammer heads were kind of eyeing us. Yeah,
they kind of stayed download that, which is good. But
it turned out to be the grouper who is the
big threat, right. Yeah, the grouper was cool looking because
it was I mean, a grouper just looks like fish.
If you look up fish, it just looks like a fish.
Like you had seen a little small tank, but it
was three hundred pounds. It looked like some land of
(07:17):
the Lost giant fish, and it was undergoing a sexual
transformation like Headwig and the angry inch right. Um. Apparently
when they turned about twenty five or so, they go
all hermaphrodite and um change sex, and apparently it's not
a pleasant process. So we had a grumpy grouper in
there who was in a tank with different kinds of
(07:39):
sharks rays. It was actually the biggest threat to us
in that tank. Hard to believe. They said, it's the
jaw could break your arm down. Pounds of anything can
break your arm. So back to the whale shark. Um.
The whale shark lives in warm ocean waters pretty much
everywhere where it's warm, except the Mediterranean exactly, which I
thought was a little It is a little odd. I'd
(08:00):
want to hang out in the Mediterranean if I was
a whale shark. And they're starting to migrate in in
new and surprising places, like they anytime they pop up.
I was reading an article they popped up um off
the coast of Mississippi, Louisiana. Actually I'm sorry, UM. And
some guy who spotted him was a commercial fisherman and
they were hanging around. Uh and within like several hours
(08:22):
or a day, his commercial fishing vessel was suddenly a
research vessel. All these scientists flew down and chartered his
boat and went out there. He took him out there
to to study them because we know so little about him, right, Yeah,
for the most part, they're starting to learn though, since
we may able to keep them in captivity, they're learning
a lot more. As Chris Coco are are host and
(08:43):
shark expert at the aquarium. Yeah, and Chuck and I
aren't um immune to the arguments about zoology and keeping
animals in captivity or the whole concept of a zoo. Um.
You know, I definitely see both sides of the argument.
But Chris Coco was able to produce um some evidence
(09:04):
that this exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium. And I think
they're the only whale sharks in the Western Hemisphere in captivity, right, Yeah,
you can find them in Japan and then fifteen minutes
down the road from where we are. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Right.
So Chris said that they had gotten their whale sharks
from Taiwan, which is like the whale shark fishing capital
(09:25):
of the world. I think they consume the most whale
shark meat of any country in the world as well. UM.
But since that exhibit opened UH and they formed a
relationship with Taiwan, Taiwan's kill quota went from I think
a couple hundred a year for each individual to zero.
And one of the reasons why is um they were
(09:46):
able to show that if you if you allow a
whale shark to live, if you kill a whale shark
in Taiwan, I read that fishermen would get about ten
kilograms a pound or ten cents of kilogram. That was
the non conversion ten cents of kilogram for a whale
shark me, which is kind of substantial, but really not
so much. In India they get something like four thousand
(10:07):
dollars a whale shark. UM A lot of money, it is,
but that's it. That's all you made off of that
whale shark, regardless of the size, right, Okay, but at
the same time you've killed it, you can only make
money off of it. It's sale once. Thanks to the
burgeoning UM I guess sector of eco tourism, people are
(10:28):
starting to figure out that you can make money over
and over and over again off of a single whale
shark through eco tourism, right because you know we what
we did when we swam at the Georgia Aquarium. Anybody
can do for like I think two bucks or whatever
and for full scuba diving um and Georgia Aquarium is
(10:50):
not the only place to do it. I mean you
can do it out in the wild and people are
realizing that you can make a ton of money off
of it. I think the Australia Conservation Union as demated
that the value, the annual value of each whale shark
is somewhere in the neighborhood of hundred and eighty two
or two two thousand dollars, and we're talking. You know,
some of the economies where whale sharks hang out are
(11:13):
not the richest in the world, so you know, they
can generate serious income if these these local economies can
figure out how to really most efficiently shift from whale
shark fishing to eco tourism and finning, which is gross. Yeah,
shark finning for those who don't know, shark fin soup
is a delicacy in certain parts of the world, and
(11:33):
shark finning literally means you pull the shark up on
your boat. Sometimes not even sometimes they do it from
the water, dude, and cut the fins off and throw
it back in the water, or just keep it in
the water where the shark dies and that's it. That's
the only part they use is to fin well. They
bleed to death, yes, awful. And they also without their
their fin they lose any um way of navigation, so
(11:55):
they're just kind of drifting about bleeding to death. It's
not a not a nice death. And we should also
say to that um. The whale shark doesn't reach reproductive
age until they think about twenty five or thirty years,
So the problem is, like a lot of animals who
have a late reproductive cycle, you kill them before that time,
and what's gonna happen. They're not gonna have shark pups.
(12:18):
It has a huge, huge impact done on the species
big time, because they have up to like two and
three hundred pups at a time. So you're every shark
you kill before that age, you're shorting two or three
hundred potential sharks. And its biggest predator obviously is the human. Yeah, absolutely,
it's the biggest fishing to see, there's not a lot
(12:38):
of comers to take on, you know, a whale shark,
which is funny because they're so peaceful and gentle. They
really are um and their diet is actually really really light. Yeah,
let's talk about that. That's cool. Okay. So they are
filter feeders, right. Uh. They generally just eat plankton, which
is really tiny, nearly microscopic um plant an animal life
(13:00):
just kind of is suspended in the ocean. They're also
surface dwellers, which is where the plankton is, and krill too,
which are like teeny little shrimps and actual little shrimp
as well. Uh. And in captivity, they also love dog food.
It looked like remember those little brown cubes of nastiness
they're feeding it. Yeah, that was a gelatine mixture that
they made their dequarian. But for their size, you know,
(13:23):
they actually don't eat a lot right at once, but
they eat constantly out in the wild, right, It's all
they do. So they're they're drifting along with their mouth
open pretty much, and the plankton goes in right like
a little vacuum. Huh. And then whatever can't get out
of the gills get stuck there. And what do they
do chuck. Well, they the gills actually as like a
(13:45):
like a strainer, so the water goes out and then
they're the algae and the krill and everything or in
the mouth. And don't they cough? And they cough it
like they howk up a bunch of planktons. Oh yeah,
if they if it's too big, if I think two centimeters,
anything over two centimeters, they'll hack back up and spit out.
And I did ask, actually Gus ask Chris at the aquarium, like,
(14:06):
when you're feeding these guys, do they did one of
these other fish because the other fish kind of hang
out to try and get little leftovers. Yeah. Remember, And
I was like, do you ever see one of the
bigger fish accidentally get sucked in this huge mouth? He said, yeah,
that's happened a couple of times, and they pretty much
cough it peck out really quickly. And he said that
swims out of the fish is expelled it about twice
the speed it was originally going in. I really wanted
(14:28):
to see that. I didn't, Yeah, because you know, fish
make funny faces when they're scared. So we have figured
out some stuff about whale sharks um just from the
few studies that have been able to be conducted. I
read an estimate Chuck that there was like five hundred
thousand and estimated five hundred thousand in the wild, which
is really really low. Yeah, especially considering that millions of
(14:52):
sharks are killed each year recreationally. Millions, dude, millions. The
highest estimate I saw was a hundred million. The in
the media and I think was about thirty million. Sad,
but yeah, if there's five hundred thousand of you and
people are indiscriminately killing sharks and you're in trouble, yeah,
well their listed is vulnerable by the World Conservation Union,
(15:13):
so that's no good. But what we have figured out
for a long time, they thought that whale sharks actually
laid eggs, right, yeah, which is not the case. Now
they have pups they do um. I think in female
whale shark was killed and they cut her open and
found three hundred well shark pups sixteen. I bet that
(15:34):
is one of the cutest things you've ever seen, dead
whale shark pups. No, well, it's it's funny. Yeah, I
forgot the fact that the fact that they were dead,
that's under pretty insensitive. I would just say, like a
two ft whale shark pup would be really cute alive,
I'm sure, because they're pretty cute. Twenty ft they are. Yeah,
they they have their mouths are at the front of
(15:57):
their face, not under the unusual flash shark yeah usually,
and it's just this big, wide, narrow, gaping mall. Yeah,
a big square head really, and their eyes are real
tiny and kind of on the side, and they're just
they're cute, they're big. You just want to cuddle with them.
I know, I really wanted to touch one and kind
of give it a hug, but they said, uh, and
we'll actually talk about this when you're swimming with the
(16:19):
fish in the wild. It's called a soft encounter. Yeah,
So basically, you want to be a you want to watch,
you don't want to be a participant. Well, anytime they
got nearest, we had to like lay flat and still
and just let them pass by and let him check
us out. Pretty cool, yeah, but they're they're whale sharks.
Aren't the only things that you can have a soft
encounter with, right, We can have a soft encounter with you,
(16:41):
big boy. It would be super soft encounter. Even our
producer Jerry got in on that, Yes, you can also
swim with humpback whales. It's pretty popular. Um in the
Dominican Republic and the South Pacific island of Ponga, you
can swim with humpback whales, another docile creature and chuck. Actually,
(17:02):
there's a there's a place in the Philippines that has
become kind of a hot spot for um soft encounters,
soft in water encounters. Right, soft encounter cracks me up
so much, it is kind of funny. Um. And that's
a doncile Philippines right right. They were really the kind
of the first to get on board with the soft
(17:23):
encounter eco tourism thing. Um, and they've kind of provided
a model for everybody else. Absolutely. You know another creature
that people like swimming with, but it doesn't usually work out. Dolphins.
People love dolphins. Well, yeah, you said in another article
(17:44):
that you wrote, um, what was the name of it?
What sea creatures can you swim with? Yeah? That that
you would think that, you know, you just hang onto
the dolphins fin and go for a ride and maybe
it would let you, But all of a sudden you'd
find that you were going really fast and if the
dolphin wanted to dive really deep and you would be
in some serious trouble. Yeah, dolphins are fun, but there's
no way you're gonna do the flipper thing and hang
(18:05):
on and take a little ride. Plus also they're deadly
deadly creatures. Are they hate humans? Dolphins? Now? I thought
they like people. You're josh and they're all about the
soft encounter. Um, there is another side of the coin here.
You can also swim with sea lions by the way,
and sting rays, ah and seals here and there, Like
(18:26):
in the UK you can swim with seals. But there
is another side to this which a lot of wildlife
experts kind of decry this whole practice, and they say
you shouldn't be able to do this at sea world.
You shouldn't do this in the wild because when you
swim with sharks like um, the small reef sharks and
things will chum the water. They say that disrupts their
feeding cycle and just being humans being around them basically
(18:50):
says disrupts their whole uh underwater system they got going there?
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean think about we're we're all
pretty much lousy with swine flu these days. You don't
need to that into their environment. It's terrible, So there
are two sides to the coin. I mean, it's good
for a lot of these places. It's a big part
of their uh, their income as a country. You know
a lot of these places are poor. You know, they're
(19:12):
not like swimming off the coast of Abitha or anything
like that. No, like Philippines not necessarily the wealthiest country
in the world. Yeah, so they could use the money. Um,
where do you fall What do you think of eco
tourism versus the butchering of sharks? Well, no, no, no no,
I mean I mean just period, like should they be
(19:33):
completely left alone or should this stuff be allowed? I'm
curious because I still don't know what to think. I
think you can learn a lot, but who knows if
there's any damage being done. Well. Yeah, Also in the
other problems you posted about, um, the French tourism board
asking Parisians to smile at the tourist swine recently, right,
I mean, there are a lot of yokels out there
(19:54):
who would love to just maybe get in a slap
fight with the seal or something like that. Um, so
there's always that danger. But again, I think if it's
the if it's the choice between making money, you have
to make money. Humans have to make money, and if
you're a coastal economy, you're gonna make money off of
the sea. So you're gonna make money off of the
seat through conservation that eco tourism can provide, or you're
(20:17):
gonna do it by catching and killing whale sharks for
their fits. Right, That's clearly the choice is obvious, and
there's but there's also more sustainable ways that you can
carry out ecotourism as well. And I think that since
it's such a new embudding economic sector, we don't really
fully know how to do that yet, but I think
it's good that that's the direction we're moving it. Yeah,
(20:38):
that's that's my final judgment. What I want to do
now is uh, and I now I kept you because
you're scuba certified. Apologize again, don't worry about it. I
kept you from scuba diving because I could not scuba
dive and we both had to stay together. Uh, that's
my next goal. I want to get down there because
we got some of the we got the big the
whale shark, and we got some of the smaller fish
checking us out. But I wanted to get down there
(21:01):
with the sharks. The hammer head and the reef shark
What did you think about breathing underwater? Though? How cool?
Is that? Pretty cool? When you're actually completely submerged and
you're pretty cool underwater. It's it's the most amazing thing ever. Yeah,
but it wore me out. We talked about that. I
was exhausted, were totally wiped for the rest of the
And it wasn't just the bacon cheeseburger and chicken fingers
(21:23):
we each had for lunch afterward. It was definitely the
compressed air has an effect. But it's still pretty cool hobby,
albeit probably the most expensive one around aside from maybe
private private piloting. Yeah, I would say that's expensive to
I got one more thing for the whale sharks for you.
What you got? So? India is a huge um whale
(21:44):
shark fishing capital. And uh, there was a holy man
named um Murari Bapu who a couple of years back
was visiting Vera Belle, India, which is a coastal town.
And Um he waded out into the water and saw
a whale shark caught in a net and he blessed
it and said that he would like to see this
(22:06):
whale shark freed and left alone. And this really bustling
whale shark capital suddenly its whale shark fishing dropped off completely,
and the local government had been trying to prevent whale
shark fishing for years to no avail. This guy goes
out there blesses a whale shark, and all of a sudden,
they don't whale shark out there anymore. Huh. Yeah, so
(22:30):
maybe we could get al gore in a robe or something.
And yeah, I don't know how much credit he would
get and say Louisiana, but he's he's working his magic
in India sportsman's paradise. So go bapoo, thank you. I
had a soft encounter with him. That's it for whale sharks.
And uh, we would like to go ahead and tell
(22:51):
you to head on over to Frenzied waters dot com
that has Mr Chuck Bryant and some of our other
staffers from how Stuff Works dot COM's work um on
that site. You can also check out shark week dot
com for a bunch of stuff on the internet for
Shark Week, and if you're too lazy to type, you
can just watch Shark Week on Discovery Channel from August
(23:13):
second to eight yeah, and watch Blood in the Water.
That's the show they did about the UH nineteen sixteen
and tax in New Jersey. It's really cool. I watched it.
Oh yeah, good. And if you want to see the
picture of Josher's and I with the whale sharks, I
put one up in the blog. Yeah. What was the
name of the post. I believe it was Josh and
Chuck swim with Sharks appropriately enough, Yes, I should have
(23:34):
been Josh and Chuck has soft Encounter, but that would
have been a different picture altogether. You can find that
and actually you can also find some really nice articles
that Chuck Bryant wrote on sharks in general on how
stuff Works dot com. And Molly Edmonds she wrote a
lot of them. Sure so did Toothman. Yeah. Um, you
can find those on how stuff Works dot com. And
(23:55):
since I just said that word together, that means it's
time for a listener man, right, Okay, Josh, I'm just
gonna call this one uh toxo listener mail. And I knew,
dude that when we did the taxo plasmosis, that we
would have one person that says, I've got it and
(24:15):
here's what it's like. Well, technically, of the people who
write and should say that they have it. Yeah, but
this guy like, all right, just let me read it
to you. This is from Josh. Is this my life
as a taxo fetus? Just listen to your toxoplasmosis podcast
and blew my mind, Or maybe my mind was broken
already since I was born with the parasite. My mother
(24:37):
grew up on a farm that was lousy with barn
cats and often had the duty of changing the household
litter box. When she was pregnant and I was an
early term fetus, her doctor told her that she had
high levels of toxoplasmosis and the test suggested that her
baby ME would likely have severe birth defects, including I
am not making this up, the failure to develop a head. Awesome. Obviously,
(25:00):
such a fetus would be still born, and the doctor
recommended that my mother consider her options, including an early
term abortion. My mom stuck it out until her first
ultrasound and a number of subsequent tests suggested that I
did indeed have a head, so ye haw h. The
doctor still warned of the possible mental handicaps, including mental retardation,
but my eventual birth and years of elementary school test
(25:23):
proved him wrong once again. So I supposed to take
away from your listener is if you're a pregnant woman
with toxoplasmos toxoplasmosis, don't give up hope because your baby
just might pull through and have a head after all.
Listening to your podcast, I found that many of the
associated behaviors of toxoplasmosis hosts fit our situation. My mother
(25:44):
is indeed warm and open hearted, and I am kind
of a stubborn and dogmatic jerk. I don't have any
fondness for cats. However, I wouldn't diagn diagnose myself as schizophrenic.
The two of my other personalities would disagree. Josh is
a funny guy. Um a very us enjoyed the podcast
and hope you're both enjoying the Georgian summer heat. We
(26:04):
are not, in fact, Josh, Yeah, that was from John
asked it here, who was a PhD candidate at the
Department of Natural Resource Science at the University of Rhode Island.
Thanks Josh, and good luck to you on your doctoral candidacy. Also,
we got a bunch of emails Chuck from people who
wanted to know how they could be diagnosed or not
diagnosed with toxoplasmosis and um. From what I understand, it's
(26:28):
just a simple blood test to check for anybodies that
that developed a ward off the taxoplasmatic systems at your
local CDs under the taxo plasmosis island right not true
or Jimmy's bait shop and blood test galore right, he
serves up live bait, toxoplasmosa tests and express up. Have
you seen that place indicator that's that It says live
(26:52):
bait pets taxes really yea interesting they sell live bait
and do taxes? Didn't make you an expressive? Sure? If
you want to talk to Chuck and I about any
possible developmental diseases that you're in danger of having as
a fetus, you can send us an email to stuff
podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on
(27:18):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
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are things we can change together. Visit how stuff works
dot com and search Forward Thinking to join the movement. Hi,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant. Chuck,
are you falling sleep? Buddy? Meditating? It's the morning. This
is not our usual time to record, so I'm very
curious to see just how much worse than usual this
(00:44):
one through. But it is Friday morning, is it? You
know me? I'm big on the Friday recording. It's Friday
short stay again. I know Chuck looks like a straight
up summer babe, ye call them, but his legs look
like milk bottles. A good thing. Pretty white Okay, Yeah
I thought you meant the curvature. Okay, the white notes.
(01:06):
So yeah, no, they look at it. It only slathers
me with some block because I'm not allowed to beatan anymore.
Do you have to wear like one of those big
sun hats when you go out. I do. My dad
dresses like that. He dresses like he's afraid of stars
or something. He puts on a big old hat and
a little surgical mask the lawn and oh yeah, it's awesome.
He gets very androgynous when he's mowing the lawn. Okay,
(01:27):
it's weird, Chuck. We got a package recently that I
would like you to describe, Josh. This is Dare I say,
one of the cooler promotional items I've ever seen from
a company. Agreed, Yeah, this is from our parent company, Discovery.
And what they did was they sent out to promote
their Shark Week, which, as everyone knows, is huge. It is.
(01:50):
Have you ever seen the shark gun the building at
a Discovery HQ and describing, Well, it's a pretty standard
looking building normally, but around Shark Week time they have
a giant shark head coming on the building on one
side and a giant shark tail coming out on the
other and I suspect a giant shark fin coming out
(02:10):
of the top and on the sides. It looks awesome.
It's pretty cool. Actually, you can google that if you're
interested in looking at that. I think if you like
to look up Discovery headquarters Shark weeken shore, you can
find pictures and talking. I know a little bit about sharks.
We've written tons of articles on him around Shark Week,
many many, And so what they sent out was it's
a jar art directed to look like an old beat
(02:33):
up jar short that may have washed up on shore.
And inside we were surprised to first find a pair
of chewed up beat shorts, bloody, blood stained beat shorts.
And we've been warned that they were gonna smell. They
didn't in fact smell right, They did not smell like
death or gore. We got this cool giant shark tooth
with a on a little key chain. We got another
(02:56):
little another little floaty keychain with is an O bit
in there the obituaries, an obituary type as if it
was from an old newspaper of Chief Martin Brody from
Jaws Fame. And one of our marketing people, sam A Dorno,
found that her O bit turned up in one of
the marketing packages to scanning her own death notice on
(03:20):
the date of her funeral. Interesting, yeah, he's lovely in fetching,
sam A Dorna, and uh so, yeah, they sent out
all this stuff and basically it's they sent him to
just different companies and media outlets around the country. They
did it anonymously, right it was. That's yeah, that's the
trick is you don't really know what it is. You
just get this suspicious package that I never would have
opened had I not known where it was from, to
(03:40):
be honest, it would have frightened me. It is pretty cool,
but yeah, it is really cool, good idea, but it
directs you to go to frenzied waters dot com, right, yeah,
and the cool stuff on that thanks in part to
our own Mr Chuck Bryant, who helped come up with
some aspects of this marketing campaign. Didn't you. I mean,
what don't you do, Chuck? I do it all due,
Yeah you do. You wear many hats and each one
(04:02):
is more fetching than the last. Yeah. I did the
the fake diary thing from the shark attacks of nineteen sixteen,
and I'm really excited. It's it's an awesome, cool thing
to work on. And our our sisters in arms over
at us Stuffy missed in history class. I think they
just recorded one, right, um, the shark attacks of nineteen sixteen,
which really happened. Yeah, it was a great story. I
(04:24):
was a little jealous I got to do that one.
But is that why you haven't been talking to either
of them? I know I've boycotted them. Yeah. Well we
happen to do something pretty cool recently, So back to us. Yeah,
it's always about us, um and uh, that is that
we swam with whale sharks, among many other types of
fish and sharks and skates and rays. Yeah, that manor
(04:46):
ray was huge. We we swam with the manaray that
was at least the size of me yr Chuck. Yeah,
I mean it looked the wingspan had to be, uh
six or eight feet across. It was a big, big boy.
Very cool. The big attraction this is at the Georgia Aquium,
the bigger track and those definitely the whale sharks, which
were I think sixteen two I think was the female was. Yeah,
(05:08):
and you know what that was. It was a noticeable
difference when that female came by. That's the coolest thing
I've ever had the opportunity to do. Yeah, so let's
let's talk about whale sharks. We'll talk about swimming with
them a little more in a little more detail. But
Chuck tell me about whales sharks. And this is based
on an article on how stuff works dot com that
you wrote. Indeed, you are the whale shark expert. You
(05:29):
spank me whenever we get into whale shark trivia and
I stalk off crime, which is all the time. Yeah.
Uh yeah, let's talk about the whale shark. Everyone knows
that it is the largest fish in the sea. I
didn't know that, which also makes it the largest shark
h in the sea. And some of these can reportedly
grow to over sixty feet dude, which is like twenty
(05:50):
ft longer than a full size school bus. Can you
imagine seeing one the largest one we saw the other day?
Can you imagine one three times that size? Yeah? I
can't either. No, I mean it's just mammoth. One of
the other things that I noticed when we were swimming
with them that I just found amazing. You remember the
one right before we got out of the tank. Yes,
I think it was the female. She was swimming right
towards me and then dipped right below me and came
(06:13):
within centimeters touching me, But at no point did she
touch me, So they apparently have some really great sense
of kinetics. Yeah, knowing exactly where every part of their
body is in relation to other things, because I don't
understand how it didn't brush against me. Yeah, we have
a couple of times we had him swim kind of
right under us. We were we didn't do a scuba dive,
(06:35):
which just so people know we're up up top, but
with a scuba tank and mask, and they would they
swam right under us, and I turned around to look
and I would see that big tail coming at me,
the big dorsal fin, and I just knew it was
gonna smack me on the way by, but it just
it never did went right on. So they're huge, and
they do appear kind of lumbering, but really they're super graceful. Yeah,
they're very cool. And they're cool looking too. And there
(06:57):
were hammer heads in there too, There were I was
a little nervous hammer heads were kind of eyeing us. Yeah,
they kind of stayed download that, which is good. But
it turned out to be the grouper who is the
big threat, right. Yeah, the grouper was cool looking because
it was I mean, a grouper just looks like fish.
If you look up fish, it just looks like a fish.
Like you had seen a little small tank, but it
was three hundred pounds. It looked like some land of
(07:17):
the Lost giant fish, and it was undergoing a sexual
transformation like Headwig and the angry inch right. Um. Apparently
when they turned about twenty five or so, they go
all hermaphrodite and um change sex, and apparently it's not
a pleasant process. So we had a grumpy grouper in
there who was in a tank with different kinds of
(07:39):
sharks rays. It was actually the biggest threat to us
in that tank. Hard to believe. They said, it's the
jaw could break your arm down. Pounds of anything can
break your arm. So back to the whale shark. Um.
The whale shark lives in warm ocean waters pretty much
everywhere where it's warm, except the Mediterranean exactly, which I
thought was a little It is a little odd. I'd
(08:00):
want to hang out in the Mediterranean if I was
a whale shark. And they're starting to migrate in in
new and surprising places, like they anytime they pop up.
I was reading an article they popped up um off
the coast of Mississippi, Louisiana. Actually I'm sorry, UM. And
some guy who spotted him was a commercial fisherman and
they were hanging around. Uh and within like several hours
(08:22):
or a day, his commercial fishing vessel was suddenly a
research vessel. All these scientists flew down and chartered his
boat and went out there. He took him out there
to to study them because we know so little about him, right, Yeah,
for the most part, they're starting to learn though, since
we may able to keep them in captivity, they're learning
a lot more. As Chris Coco are are host and
(08:43):
shark expert at the aquarium. Yeah, and Chuck and I
aren't um immune to the arguments about zoology and keeping
animals in captivity or the whole concept of a zoo. Um.
You know, I definitely see both sides of the argument.
But Chris Coco was able to produce um some evidence
(09:04):
that this exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium. And I think
they're the only whale sharks in the Western Hemisphere in captivity, right, Yeah,
you can find them in Japan and then fifteen minutes
down the road from where we are. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Right.
So Chris said that they had gotten their whale sharks
from Taiwan, which is like the whale shark fishing capital
(09:25):
of the world. I think they consume the most whale
shark meat of any country in the world as well. UM.
But since that exhibit opened UH and they formed a
relationship with Taiwan, Taiwan's kill quota went from I think
a couple hundred a year for each individual to zero.
And one of the reasons why is um they were
(09:46):
able to show that if you if you allow a
whale shark to live, if you kill a whale shark
in Taiwan, I read that fishermen would get about ten
kilograms a pound or ten cents of kilogram. That was
the non conversion ten cents of kilogram for a whale
shark me, which is kind of substantial, but really not
so much. In India they get something like four thousand
(10:07):
dollars a whale shark. UM A lot of money, it is,
but that's it. That's all you made off of that
whale shark, regardless of the size, right, Okay, but at
the same time you've killed it, you can only make
money off of it. It's sale once. Thanks to the
burgeoning UM I guess sector of eco tourism, people are
(10:28):
starting to figure out that you can make money over
and over and over again off of a single whale
shark through eco tourism, right because you know we what
we did when we swam at the Georgia Aquarium. Anybody
can do for like I think two bucks or whatever
and for full scuba diving um and Georgia Aquarium is
(10:50):
not the only place to do it. I mean you
can do it out in the wild and people are
realizing that you can make a ton of money off
of it. I think the Australia Conservation Union as demated
that the value, the annual value of each whale shark
is somewhere in the neighborhood of hundred and eighty two
or two two thousand dollars, and we're talking. You know,
some of the economies where whale sharks hang out are
(11:13):
not the richest in the world, so you know, they
can generate serious income if these these local economies can
figure out how to really most efficiently shift from whale
shark fishing to eco tourism and finning, which is gross. Yeah,
shark finning for those who don't know, shark fin soup
is a delicacy in certain parts of the world, and
(11:33):
shark finning literally means you pull the shark up on
your boat. Sometimes not even sometimes they do it from
the water, dude, and cut the fins off and throw
it back in the water, or just keep it in
the water where the shark dies and that's it. That's
the only part they use is to fin well. They
bleed to death, yes, awful. And they also without their
their fin they lose any um way of navigation, so
(11:55):
they're just kind of drifting about bleeding to death. It's
not a not a nice death. And we should also
say to that um. The whale shark doesn't reach reproductive
age until they think about twenty five or thirty years,
So the problem is, like a lot of animals who
have a late reproductive cycle, you kill them before that time,
and what's gonna happen. They're not gonna have shark pups.
(12:18):
It has a huge, huge impact done on the species
big time, because they have up to like two and
three hundred pups at a time. So you're every shark
you kill before that age, you're shorting two or three
hundred potential sharks. And its biggest predator obviously is the human. Yeah, absolutely,
it's the biggest fishing to see, there's not a lot
(12:38):
of comers to take on, you know, a whale shark,
which is funny because they're so peaceful and gentle. They
really are um and their diet is actually really really light. Yeah,
let's talk about that. That's cool. Okay. So they are
filter feeders, right. Uh. They generally just eat plankton, which
is really tiny, nearly microscopic um plant an animal life
(13:00):
just kind of is suspended in the ocean. They're also
surface dwellers, which is where the plankton is, and krill too,
which are like teeny little shrimps and actual little shrimp
as well. Uh. And in captivity, they also love dog food.
It looked like remember those little brown cubes of nastiness
they're feeding it. Yeah, that was a gelatine mixture that
they made their dequarian. But for their size, you know,
(13:23):
they actually don't eat a lot right at once, but
they eat constantly out in the wild, right, It's all
they do. So they're they're drifting along with their mouth
open pretty much, and the plankton goes in right like
a little vacuum. Huh. And then whatever can't get out
of the gills get stuck there. And what do they
do chuck. Well, they the gills actually as like a
(13:45):
like a strainer, so the water goes out and then
they're the algae and the krill and everything or in
the mouth. And don't they cough? And they cough it
like they howk up a bunch of planktons. Oh yeah,
if they if it's too big, if I think two centimeters,
anything over two centimeters, they'll hack back up and spit out.
And I did ask, actually Gus ask Chris at the aquarium, like,
(14:06):
when you're feeding these guys, do they did one of
these other fish because the other fish kind of hang
out to try and get little leftovers. Yeah. Remember, And
I was like, do you ever see one of the
bigger fish accidentally get sucked in this huge mouth? He said, yeah,
that's happened a couple of times, and they pretty much
cough it peck out really quickly. And he said that
swims out of the fish is expelled it about twice
the speed it was originally going in. I really wanted
(14:28):
to see that. I didn't, Yeah, because you know, fish
make funny faces when they're scared. So we have figured
out some stuff about whale sharks um just from the
few studies that have been able to be conducted. I
read an estimate Chuck that there was like five hundred
thousand and estimated five hundred thousand in the wild, which
is really really low. Yeah, especially considering that millions of
(14:52):
sharks are killed each year recreationally. Millions, dude, millions. The
highest estimate I saw was a hundred million. The in
the media and I think was about thirty million. Sad,
but yeah, if there's five hundred thousand of you and
people are indiscriminately killing sharks and you're in trouble, yeah,
well their listed is vulnerable by the World Conservation Union,
(15:13):
so that's no good. But what we have figured out
for a long time, they thought that whale sharks actually
laid eggs, right, yeah, which is not the case. Now
they have pups they do um. I think in female
whale shark was killed and they cut her open and
found three hundred well shark pups sixteen. I bet that
(15:34):
is one of the cutest things you've ever seen, dead
whale shark pups. No, well, it's it's funny. Yeah, I
forgot the fact that the fact that they were dead,
that's under pretty insensitive. I would just say, like a
two ft whale shark pup would be really cute alive,
I'm sure, because they're pretty cute. Twenty ft they are. Yeah,
they they have their mouths are at the front of
(15:57):
their face, not under the unusual flash shark yeah usually,
and it's just this big, wide, narrow, gaping mall. Yeah,
a big square head really, and their eyes are real
tiny and kind of on the side, and they're just
they're cute, they're big. You just want to cuddle with them.
I know, I really wanted to touch one and kind
of give it a hug, but they said, uh, and
we'll actually talk about this when you're swimming with the
(16:19):
fish in the wild. It's called a soft encounter. Yeah,
So basically, you want to be a you want to watch,
you don't want to be a participant. Well, anytime they
got nearest, we had to like lay flat and still
and just let them pass by and let him check
us out. Pretty cool, yeah, but they're they're whale sharks.
Aren't the only things that you can have a soft
encounter with, right, We can have a soft encounter with you,
(16:41):
big boy. It would be super soft encounter. Even our
producer Jerry got in on that, Yes, you can also
swim with humpback whales. It's pretty popular. Um in the
Dominican Republic and the South Pacific island of Ponga, you
can swim with humpback whales, another docile creature and chuck. Actually,
(17:02):
there's a there's a place in the Philippines that has
become kind of a hot spot for um soft encounters,
soft in water encounters. Right, soft encounter cracks me up
so much, it is kind of funny. Um. And that's
a doncile Philippines right right. They were really the kind
of the first to get on board with the soft
(17:23):
encounter eco tourism thing. Um, and they've kind of provided
a model for everybody else. Absolutely. You know another creature
that people like swimming with, but it doesn't usually work out. Dolphins.
People love dolphins. Well, yeah, you said in another article
(17:44):
that you wrote, um, what was the name of it?
What sea creatures can you swim with? Yeah? That that
you would think that, you know, you just hang onto
the dolphins fin and go for a ride and maybe
it would let you, But all of a sudden you'd
find that you were going really fast and if the
dolphin wanted to dive really deep and you would be
in some serious trouble. Yeah, dolphins are fun, but there's
no way you're gonna do the flipper thing and hang
(18:05):
on and take a little ride. Plus also they're deadly
deadly creatures. Are they hate humans? Dolphins? Now? I thought
they like people. You're josh and they're all about the
soft encounter. Um, there is another side of the coin here.
You can also swim with sea lions by the way,
and sting rays, ah and seals here and there, Like
(18:26):
in the UK you can swim with seals. But there
is another side to this which a lot of wildlife
experts kind of decry this whole practice, and they say
you shouldn't be able to do this at sea world.
You shouldn't do this in the wild because when you
swim with sharks like um, the small reef sharks and
things will chum the water. They say that disrupts their
feeding cycle and just being humans being around them basically
(18:50):
says disrupts their whole uh underwater system they got going there?
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean think about we're we're all
pretty much lousy with swine flu these days. You don't
need to that into their environment. It's terrible, So there
are two sides to the coin. I mean, it's good
for a lot of these places. It's a big part
of their uh, their income as a country. You know
a lot of these places are poor. You know, they're
(19:12):
not like swimming off the coast of Abitha or anything
like that. No, like Philippines not necessarily the wealthiest country
in the world. Yeah, so they could use the money. Um,
where do you fall What do you think of eco
tourism versus the butchering of sharks? Well, no, no, no no,
I mean I mean just period, like should they be
(19:33):
completely left alone or should this stuff be allowed? I'm
curious because I still don't know what to think. I
think you can learn a lot, but who knows if
there's any damage being done. Well. Yeah, Also in the
other problems you posted about, um, the French tourism board
asking Parisians to smile at the tourist swine recently, right,
I mean, there are a lot of yokels out there
(19:54):
who would love to just maybe get in a slap
fight with the seal or something like that. Um, so
there's always that danger. But again, I think if it's
the if it's the choice between making money, you have
to make money. Humans have to make money, and if
you're a coastal economy, you're gonna make money off of
the sea. So you're gonna make money off of the
seat through conservation that eco tourism can provide, or you're
(20:17):
gonna do it by catching and killing whale sharks for
their fits. Right, That's clearly the choice is obvious, and
there's but there's also more sustainable ways that you can
carry out ecotourism as well. And I think that since
it's such a new embudding economic sector, we don't really
fully know how to do that yet, but I think
it's good that that's the direction we're moving it. Yeah,
(20:38):
that's that's my final judgment. What I want to do
now is uh, and I now I kept you because
you're scuba certified. Apologize again, don't worry about it. I
kept you from scuba diving because I could not scuba
dive and we both had to stay together. Uh, that's
my next goal. I want to get down there because
we got some of the we got the big the
whale shark, and we got some of the smaller fish
checking us out. But I wanted to get down there
(21:01):
with the sharks. The hammer head and the reef shark
What did you think about breathing underwater? Though? How cool?
Is that? Pretty cool? When you're actually completely submerged and
you're pretty cool underwater. It's it's the most amazing thing ever. Yeah,
but it wore me out. We talked about that. I
was exhausted, were totally wiped for the rest of the
And it wasn't just the bacon cheeseburger and chicken fingers
(21:23):
we each had for lunch afterward. It was definitely the
compressed air has an effect. But it's still pretty cool hobby,
albeit probably the most expensive one around aside from maybe
private private piloting. Yeah, I would say that's expensive to
I got one more thing for the whale sharks for you.
What you got? So? India is a huge um whale
(21:44):
shark fishing capital. And uh, there was a holy man
named um Murari Bapu who a couple of years back
was visiting Vera Belle, India, which is a coastal town.
And Um he waded out into the water and saw
a whale shark caught in a net and he blessed
it and said that he would like to see this
(22:06):
whale shark freed and left alone. And this really bustling
whale shark capital suddenly its whale shark fishing dropped off completely,
and the local government had been trying to prevent whale
shark fishing for years to no avail. This guy goes
out there blesses a whale shark, and all of a sudden,
they don't whale shark out there anymore. Huh. Yeah, so
(22:30):
maybe we could get al gore in a robe or something.
And yeah, I don't know how much credit he would
get and say Louisiana, but he's he's working his magic
in India sportsman's paradise. So go bapoo, thank you. I
had a soft encounter with him. That's it for whale sharks.
And uh, we would like to go ahead and tell
(22:51):
you to head on over to Frenzied waters dot com
that has Mr Chuck Bryant and some of our other
staffers from how Stuff Works dot COM's work um on
that site. You can also check out shark week dot
com for a bunch of stuff on the internet for
Shark Week, and if you're too lazy to type, you
can just watch Shark Week on Discovery Channel from August
(23:13):
second to eight yeah, and watch Blood in the Water.
That's the show they did about the UH nineteen sixteen
and tax in New Jersey. It's really cool. I watched it.
Oh yeah, good. And if you want to see the
picture of Josher's and I with the whale sharks, I
put one up in the blog. Yeah. What was the
name of the post. I believe it was Josh and
Chuck swim with Sharks appropriately enough, Yes, I should have
(23:34):
been Josh and Chuck has soft Encounter, but that would
have been a different picture altogether. You can find that
and actually you can also find some really nice articles
that Chuck Bryant wrote on sharks in general on how
stuff Works dot com. And Molly Edmonds she wrote a
lot of them. Sure so did Toothman. Yeah. Um, you
can find those on how stuff Works dot com. And
(23:55):
since I just said that word together, that means it's
time for a listener man, right, Okay, Josh, I'm just
gonna call this one uh toxo listener mail. And I knew,
dude that when we did the taxo plasmosis, that we
would have one person that says, I've got it and
(24:15):
here's what it's like. Well, technically, of the people who
write and should say that they have it. Yeah, but
this guy like, all right, just let me read it
to you. This is from Josh. Is this my life
as a taxo fetus? Just listen to your toxoplasmosis podcast
and blew my mind, Or maybe my mind was broken
already since I was born with the parasite. My mother
(24:37):
grew up on a farm that was lousy with barn
cats and often had the duty of changing the household
litter box. When she was pregnant and I was an
early term fetus, her doctor told her that she had
high levels of toxoplasmosis and the test suggested that her
baby ME would likely have severe birth defects, including I
am not making this up, the failure to develop a head. Awesome. Obviously,
(25:00):
such a fetus would be still born, and the doctor
recommended that my mother consider her options, including an early
term abortion. My mom stuck it out until her first
ultrasound and a number of subsequent tests suggested that I
did indeed have a head, so ye haw h. The
doctor still warned of the possible mental handicaps, including mental retardation,
but my eventual birth and years of elementary school test
(25:23):
proved him wrong once again. So I supposed to take
away from your listener is if you're a pregnant woman
with toxoplasmos toxoplasmosis, don't give up hope because your baby
just might pull through and have a head after all.
Listening to your podcast, I found that many of the
associated behaviors of toxoplasmosis hosts fit our situation. My mother
(25:44):
is indeed warm and open hearted, and I am kind
of a stubborn and dogmatic jerk. I don't have any
fondness for cats. However, I wouldn't diagn diagnose myself as schizophrenic.
The two of my other personalities would disagree. Josh is
a funny guy. Um a very us enjoyed the podcast
and hope you're both enjoying the Georgian summer heat. We
(26:04):
are not, in fact, Josh, Yeah, that was from John
asked it here, who was a PhD candidate at the
Department of Natural Resource Science at the University of Rhode Island.
Thanks Josh, and good luck to you on your doctoral candidacy. Also,
we got a bunch of emails Chuck from people who
wanted to know how they could be diagnosed or not
diagnosed with toxoplasmosis and um. From what I understand, it's
(26:28):
just a simple blood test to check for anybodies that
that developed a ward off the taxoplasmatic systems at your
local CDs under the taxo plasmosis island right not true
or Jimmy's bait shop and blood test galore right, he
serves up live bait, toxoplasmosa tests and express up. Have
you seen that place indicator that's that It says live
(26:52):
bait pets taxes really yea interesting they sell live bait
and do taxes? Didn't make you an expressive? Sure? If
you want to talk to Chuck and I about any
possible developmental diseases that you're in danger of having as
a fetus, you can send us an email to stuff
podcast at how stuff works dot com For more on
(27:18):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
our blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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