Whale Sharks — the Biggest Fish

If asked what fish in the sea is the biggest, someone may be suggest the whale. If you want to tease, coax them to say the blue whale. Then tell them that they are half right because a whale is a mammal, but the largest fish is the whale shark.

Unfortunately, sharks get bad press, especially after that Spielberg movie. Most are not interested in seeking humans for lunch, but someone says shark and people panic. Nurse sharks are harmless. While the whale shark has teeth and denticles to spare, it eats much smaller things.

Whale Shark, Flickr / Mike Johnston (CC BY 2.0)

Speaking of teeth, whale sharks even have some on their eyes. Well, sorta. Those are denticles —

"So if they look the same, are they eye denticle, Cowboy Bob?"

Uh, sure. Moving on...

Darwinists have floated explanations that just won't wash, but those on the eyes are very modified and used to for eye protection. Also, evolutionists did that thing they have done so often: If they don't understand an organ, structure, or whatever, they praise the Bearded Buddha (blessed be!) and call those things vestigial — useless leftovers from an evolutionary past.

Give them something to chew on with the fact that there is no evidence for whale shark evolution, so this vestigial stuff is nonsense. Indeed, whale sharks are marvels of the Master Engineer's work, exhibiting numerous complex areas where they are designed to do gentle giant whale shark stuff. Interestingly, they act like whales because they take big gulps of water and filter it, but do not have the same apparatus.

Its genus name Rhincodon comes from the Greek for ‘rasp-tooth’, due to the rough appearance of its teeth. Adults grow on average to 18 m (59 ft) long, and weigh over 12 tonnes. Specimens weighing up to 42 t and 21 m (70 ft) long have been reported, though not fully confirmed. (That’s about two large buses in length!)

Beautifully coloured, their backs and sides are marked with checkerboard patterns of spots and stripes. Each individual has its own unique pattern. This has led some researchers to suspect whale sharks can recognize each other. They are filter feeders, eating plankton (2–3 t/day), small crustaceans, squid, and medium-sized fish (< 30 cm, 1 ft). Whale sharks suck in vast amounts of water containing such organisms through their wide mouths (1.5 m, 5 ft). They then filter it through their enormous gills, using these to sieve their food as well as to extract oxygen from the water.

You can read it all at "Wonderful whale sharks — Divinely designed denizens of the deep."