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Marine biology

No hibernation for basking sharks

Nature volume 400, pages 717–718 (1999)Cite this article

The phrase ‘gentle giants’ and the word sharks do not usually appear in the same sentence — sharks normally evoke the image of a bloody, tooth-filled mouth as in the film Jaws. But the biggest species of selachians (sharks) are, in fact, placid, slowly moving grazers that feed by filtering plankton. They swim with a widely opened mouth, engulfing small prey and the water they are in, and using long, bristle-like projections on the gill arches to remove the prey.

Actually, what Sims shows is that we probably do not need complicated explanations such as hibernation. These complex models came about because original investigators assumed the energy content of copepods (the main constituent of the planktonic soup ingested by basking sharks) to be three orders of magnitude larger than currently accepted values. This large overestimation did not result in absurd conclusions (which, presumably, would have alerted previous investigators to the error) because initial estimates of the energy cost of swimming were also between one and two orders of magnitude too big.

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Figure 1: Feeding time.

JEFF ROTMAN/BBC NATURAL HISTORY UNIT

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  1. the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, 32000, Haifa, Israel

    Daniel Weihs

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  1. Daniel Weihs
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Weihs, D. No hibernation for basking sharks. Nature 400, 717–718 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/23368

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