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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
  • Correction 16 May 2022

Gentle-giant sharks are on a collision course with mighty ships

Tracking data from nearly 350 whale sharks suggest that the endangered fish are being killed by large vessels.
Underwater photograph of a whale shark with a wide open mouth feeding near the water's surface.

The puzzling decline of the whale shark, which often feeds near the sea surface, might be due in part to lethal encounters with cargo ships and tankers. Credit: Gregory Sweeney/Getty

Collisions with ships pose a lethal threat to the world’s largest fish, new research suggests.

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Nature 605, 399 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01275-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 16 May 2022: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the overlap between whale sharks and ships.

References

  1. Womersley, F. C. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117440119 (2022).

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