![]() In addition, whale sharks are highly mobile, capable of travelling thousands of kilometres, as evident by an individual who was tracked over 37 months between the Gulf of California and Tonga a distance of 13,000km. So why is such an iconic species suffering such a reduction in numbers? Like many elasmobranchs, whale sharks are susceptible to overexploitation because their slow growth rate and late sexual maturity limit the annual recruitment of new individuals. ![]() Whale shark (Adam WS018) cruises along the reef edge in South Ari Atoll, Maldives. Global abundance has plummeted by 50% over the past 75 years, which has justified the recent re-classification of whale sharks as ‘Endangered’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This charismatic and well-loved elasmobranch seems to have escaped the negative brush that most other shark species are painted with, yet populations in the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific are declining. The whale shark ( Rhincodon typus) is not exempt from this reality. Unsurprisingly, removing sharks from our oceans at such a rate is unsustainable and two-thirds of all chondrichthyans (the order of cartilaginous fish to which sharks belong) are at risk of becoming extinct. That’s a whopping 31,164 sharks killed per hour by humans. What might surprise you further is that this is a conservative estimate and the number may in fact be as high as 273 million. It may surprise you that 100 million sharks are killed by people each year. Written by Edward Doherty, our In-field Marine Biologist, for the Blue Planet Society.
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