Goodbyes are the worst things ever. EVER. Especially when it comes to two people I have looked up to for so long. Not only are Al and Rick impeccable science communicators, when I think of tangible hope for our oceans…their names are at the top of the list. I could not think of two finer gentlemen on the front lines of oceanic research and conservation. I salute you both.

Al- I hope that my secret dream of stowing away on a research vessel and frolicking with you through fields of whale sharks…is still a viable plan.

Rick- Since we have never met in person, I can’t confirm or deny your existence. But I live vicariously through your Facebook adventures and conservation conquests. I hope one day our mugs may clink in joyous union. Vinaka my friend.

As I stand here at the edge of the dock, I pour two shots of only the finest  scotch into the briny blue. A high toast to each of you. And in true DSN fashion, I bid thee farewell on the sails of a shanty.

The post Long May Your Big Jib Draw first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The cognitive dissonance between what happens (biologically) in that video, what the two intrepid heroes do, and what’s reported, fills me with dismay for society.  If that seems hyperbolic, bear with me.  Let’s break it down:

What the story says

Benchley-esque narrative: blah blah “terrifying moment”, “heart stopping”, “full force”, “massive beast”, “shouting in terror”, “inches from the shark’s jaws”, “brunt of the assault” blah blah.  The only kernel of truth is the very last sentence “the whale shark is only known to eat small fish and plankton and have never been known to harm or kill a human”  Talk about burying the lede…

What actually happens

Two RealMenTM are spearfishing in the pelagic zone.  You know, where whale sharks live.  To aid in their quest to bag a tuna, our intrepid heroes chum the water with a bag of cut fish.  One curious tuna flirts with death, but is saved by the arrival on scene of a harmless and curious whale shark: as I said, a well known inhabitant of the pelagic zone and commonly associated with tuna schools.  Also, and this is important, with an impeccable sense of smell and a fairly sizable appetite.  So, whale shark arrives to investigate the source of that delicious smell, giving Hero number 1 a nudge during his sniff test.  Hero number 1 then screams like a horror film teenager.  Hero number 2 decides not to take that kind of crap from no stinking planktivore, so he grabs the animals dorsal fin for a ride, in violation of pretty much every tenet of wildlife interaction.  Doing that would and should get you summarily expelled from any well managed whale shark ecotourism operation in the world.  Animal objects and banks away to avoid the irritation.  Aaaaaand scene.

So to recap, our two heroes created a situation by going into the whale shark’s habitat with a bag of what the whale shark likes to eat.  A whale shark shows up (duh), doesn’t hurt anybody because they don’t, but gets harrassed anyway, and then journalist (that’s Kara O’Neill at the Mirror) beats it up into some sort of horror story in a case of victim blaming par excellence.  Let me tell you, if that’s a horror story, then I’m Rob freakin’ Zombie, because I’ve got several similar videos (sans the harassment of course).  Every time there has been physical contact between me and a whale shark it’s because I was too stupid or not quick enough to get out of its way; this is an animal the size of a school bus and you need you have your head on a swivel.  Hero 1 did not, got bumped, but no harm no foul because the critter is intrinsically harmless.  The real foul here is how the incident is portrayed, and that’s what fills me with dismay.  How are we ever supposed to get folks to understand, ergo care for, ergo protect marine life if we keep trotting out rubbish like this?  The two guys in the video should be ashamed, and so should everyone involved at The Mirror.

#Fail

The post ZOMG Whale shark attack!!!! Or not… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’ve got something important I want to share with you that is not getting the attention it should from press or the authorities.  As regular #DeepSN readers will know, I work a lot with whale sharks in Yucatan Mexico as part of the research program at Georgia Aquarium and through association with the Mexican government and Mexican Conservation NGOs like Blue Realm/Ch’ooj Ajauil AC and Amigos de Isla Contoy.  Over the last few years many folks associated with these efforts have worked extensively to understand the largest aggregation of whale sharks in the world,  and we have begun to move towards conserving the extraordinary biodiversity of the marine realm of northern Quintana Roo, from Cancun to Cabo Catoche.  But, there is now a clear and present threat to marine life in this area.

Last year in cooperation with the Mexican national parks agency CONANP and Amigos de Isla Contoy, we (including DSN’s Dr. M!) installed an AIS receiver on the observation tower at Isla Contoy National Park, an incredibly picturesque island north east of Cancun.  This device relays signals from transmitters that are compulsory on all ships over 300 tonnes; signals that indicate ship ID, location, heading, destination and so on.  Our goal was to monitor commercial ship traffic in waters to the east of the island, where the majority of whale sharks gather these days, which is close to a big shipping lane at the western entrance to the Gulf of Mexico.  On July 6, however, we noticed in the data stream a ship doing some weird maneuvers, a ship which eventually came to a stop in the area immediately north of Isla Contoy.  The AIS data showed the ship to be a 300ft long bulk chemical tanker called Atlantic Sun and that she was anchored in less than 10m of water inside the bounds of the Whale Shark Biosphere Reserve, a marine protected area established in 2009 to conserve whale shark habitat.  The area is fedeally protected and anchoring is not allowed without special permitting.  It is certainly NOT appropriate anchorage for a 300ft chemical tanker.

Working with colleagues in Mexico we sent an aerial survey to confirm the presence and disposition of the ship and showed that yes, it was anchored in the protected area.  I contacted CONANP by email to urge an investigation, but to the best of my knowledge the ship remains today anchored in the MPA, some 2 weeks later.  Reports from contacts in Mexico suggest that the ship is either mechanically disabled or out of fuel, or both, and that the company that operates the ship may be in financial difficulties, which may be why they have not summoned a tug to move the ship to a more appropriate anchorage to await repairs or refueling.  There are reportedly six people on board – 5 men and 1 woman – and they are running low on supplies.  We are told that the cargo tanks are empty, which is good, but the ship itself represents a significant risk to healthy reef patches and adjacent bottom habitats, especially if it is disabled.  The potential anchor damage alone is significant.  Oil/diesel leakage and the risk of fuel spill from at-sea refueling should also be considered.  The best course of action is an immediate tow to the nearest safe harbour.

The maddening thing about this is that we warned about the risks of this some time ago.  Oh, and think about what could happen to a crippled tanker in shallow water if THIS continues on its current trajectory…

If you share our concern for the health of the Isla Contoy National Park, and for the whale sharks, manta rays, coral reefs, turtle mating/nesting areas, flamingos, manatees, dolphins, sailfish and frigate birds of northern Quintana Roo, please spread the word to your friends and colleagues in Yucatan Mexico, because so far there has been no press coverage in Cancun (or anywhere else) of this potential environmental disaster and little action from the regulatory authorities.  Marine protected areas and National Parks exist specifically to conserve extraordinary natural assets, but what good are they if we don’t use the provisions that they afford to effectively protect such critical habitats when they need it most?

You can email CONANP at  remolina@conanp.gob.mx

The post The Atlantic Sun is a potential environmental disaster first appeared on Deep Sea News.

While the images, collected between 2010 and Dec 2013, clearly show one or more whale sharks being butchered, WildLifeRisk also submitted samples of “shark oil” to the lab of Mahmood Shivji at Nova Southeastern University’s Guy Harvey Research Institute for DNA based identification.  The team there confirmed the presence of white shark and basking shark in the samples, but “inconclusive” for the whale shark.  I called up Mahmood to ask him what that meant and he clarified that the sequence was consistent with whale shark for the supposed whale shark sample, but that the data quality wasn’t good enough to make a unequivocal ID, possibly due to the processes involved in rendering the liver down to an oil.  You hardly need a confirmed DNA ID in my opinion, since no other shark has the size and spotted pattern evident from the photos.

Perhaps most damning of all, the report links to a Vimeo video apparently taken in covert fashion, wherein the proprietor of the facility and his brother describe how much whale shark, blue shark, and basking shark oil they produce in a year, where they send it and what they do with the skins.  He also admits to relabeling the oil and smuggling the material overseas (specifically to Chinese restaurants and grocers in Europe), presumably to get around the CITES restrictions.  He also describes receiving substantial numbers of whale sharks from Taiwan, where they have been protected for several years.

China Whale Sharks from WildLifeRisk on Vimeo.

This is one of the more appalling instances of shark exploitation that I know of, and I can’t help but be particularly appalled about the inclusion of whale sharks.  As the WildLifeRisk folks point out in their release, sharks can be worth way more alive as part of the ecotourism trade than they are dead and rendered down to a bottle of oil.  But putting all that aside, whale sharks and basking sharks are magnificent, peaceful, filter feeding giants, and white sharks are an awesome and misunderstood predator.  All of them are among the most spectacular animals on the planet and they deserve and need our protection, especially in light of the recent IUCN report stating that a quarter of all shark and ray species are at risk of extinction.  They all have low reproductive potential, which means that they are not very resilient in the face of the kind of harvest shown in this report.  This isn’t a problem restricted to China, either; the whale sharks from the South China Sea may travel through the Indian and Pacific oceans, including many other countries that feature whale shark ecotourism.  So, while this specific factory is on Chinese soil, this is most definitely the world’s problem and many nations have a stake.

What can we do to help remedy this sort of situation?  I see three things.  One comes in the form of this very important exposé from WildLifeRisk: we need to recognise and define the problem.  Second, we need to enforce existing regulations that are designed to prevent this sort of tragedy. Third, we need to educate consumers so that the market forces that motivate these business practices cease to be.  WildAid has had great success with their campaign “When the buying stops, the killing can too”, where they have recruited serious star power in the form of basketball star Yao Ming and others, to reduce the market for shark fin soup in Chinese traditional cuisine.  Sometimes it’s as simple as getting people to realise “what’s in the bowl”. The story goes that the Chinese name for shark fin soup is “fish wing soup”, and many who consumed it had no idea from where it came.  Once alerted, they stopped eating it.  WildAid reports a significant success on the fin soup front, including a drop in shark fin soup consumption rates and the removal of the product from official government events.  It seems that a fairly simple extension of the successful approach of WildAid might help to reduce the motivations for the sort of unconscionable slaughter revealed by WildLifeRisk.  Perhaps you can spread the news to everyone you know and ask that they do the same, so that we might not need to see these sorts of disturbing images again.  Who knows, maybe some of our Chinese readers can help spread the word, too, because I for one prefer this:

To this:

 Are you in China and reading this?  If so, we’d love to hear from you.  Please chime in in the comments section with your perspectives, we value your feedback.

EDIT: I have had some queries about CITES – the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species –  so here’s my best understanding of what it means and why it is important in this case.  The three species here (white, whale and basking) are all CITES Appendix II listed, which means that fishing states would have to demonstrate that any exports were derived from a sustainably-managed population and to allow exports and imports to be monitored by a third party.  This effectively extinguishes most markets because the “sustainably managed population” criterion is an near impossible burden of proof when it comes to listed species, which are typically listed in the first place because they are vulnerable to or threatened with extinction.  Moreover, CITES listed products cannot be monitored effectively when mixed with other species and smuggled, as admitted in the video.  I think we can safely assume that “smuggle” in this case means that they didn’t have a CITES export permit from the Chinese government, which is a signatory to the CITES treaty.  I’ve done CITES export permitting for scientific samples from whale sharks, although not from China, and it was neither simple nor straightforward.

The post Whale shark slaughterhouse exposed in China first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Whale shark (quietly): <sip>  Ahh, that’s some good Euphausia right there. <sip>

A baleen whale explodes through the door with a couple of  his buddies, making an awful ruckus, breaching and slapping pectoral fins

Whale shark: <sip>

Whale: AAAAAHHH!  Barkeep!  Krill.  KRILL dammit, and lots of it!

The whale notices his spotty fellow bar patron, and nods his enormous head towards the whale shark:

Whale: Sup?

Whale shark: <sip> Good evening <sip>

Whale:  Good evening?  Good EVENING?  What kind of crap is that?  Hey Gary, check out Professor Snooty-pants over here, with his hoity toity Good evenings and such!

Whale shark (ignoring them): <sip>

The whale turns back to the bar

Whale: Keeerist! Whose vestigial pelvic girdle do you have to hump to get some krill around here?  I could eat a whole swarm.  Hey Gary, remember that time at Stellwagen when…aaaahhh, barkeep, bout freakin’ time, krill me, stat!

Whale shark: <sip>

The barkeep returns with several buckets of krill and sets them down in front of the whale and his mates.

Whale shark: <sip>

Whale: Barkeep, what the fudge is this?  I asked for krill, LOTS OF krill.  Engrish mofo, you speekit?

Whale shark: <sip> That IS lots of krill <sip>

Whale: Who asked you?

Whale shark (shrugging his pectoral fins): <sip>

The whale and his mates open their capacious mouths and lunge forward, the throat grooves on their necks ballooning as they engulf half the bar.  They inhale the krill, knocking over several ashtrays and a decorative lanternfish in the process.

Whale shark: <sip> Woah! Easy there bud… <sip>

Whale (with his mouth full): Exqueeze me?

Whale shark: <sip> Look, I know you rorquals hang out together because you’re insecure, but just because your neck looks like a field hockey skirt doesn’t mean you can just go around knocking stuff over, taking it out on the rest of us.  Some of us just came for a quiet bit of active surface suction feeding, meeting our scant poikilothermic energy needs with a bit of plankton here or some fish eggs there, and then you guys come in thinking you’re all boss and such, trying to inhale everything in sight and generally making a mess of the joint.  I just think maybe you ought to tone it down a bit <sip>

Whale (shocked): Come again?

Whale shark: <sip> Filter feeding is really pretty easy.  You don’t have to try to impress people by chugging it all at once, that’s all <sip>

Whale (calming down slightly): Well … how the hell else you gonna do it?

Whale shark: <sip>  You don’t pay much attention do you. *sigh* OK.  Watch me.  I open my mouth, and I swim gently forwards.  The 20 filter pads in my throat act as cross-flow filters, effectively directing water out through the gills, separating the krill with a minimum of clogging and even less fuss.  The krill accumulate at the back of my throat and I just swallow now and then when there’s enough to make it worth doing so.  Do that 8 or so hours a day and Bob’s your uncle <sip>

Whale (growing curious): Filter pads?

Whale shark: <sip> Ohhhhh!  That’s right, I forgot, you don’t have filter pads. Yikes! Aw-kward…  <sip> So how do YOU do it then?

Whale (growing excited): Oh yeah, check this out, it’s bitchin’!  It’s the only way for a hot-blooded whale to get his, knowm sayin’?  You just open your mouth as wide as you can and just sort of lunge forwards and snag the whole swarm.

The whale lunges again, this time poking the barkeep in the eye and nearly falling off his stool.

Whale shark: <sip> All right, settle down there sport <sip> So now you’ve got a mouth full of food, what are you supposed to do then?

Whale: mmm mmrph mmph mm

Whale shark: <sip> Swallow first, then talk <sip>

Whale (swallowing): Oh yeah, well my tongue is, like huge, so I just use it to squeeze all the water back out of my mouth.

Whale shark: <sip> How do you separate the food?

Whale (grinning): Scope my grill!  Baleen bitches, it works!  I squeeze the water through these bad boys, they trap the plankton and then I just sort of lick it all off.

Whale shark (grimacing): Sheesh!  Put that away!  Wait, so you mean to tell me you can only filter one mouthful at a time? And the water comes back out the same way it went in? And you have to squeeze it out with your tongue? And the baleen clogs every time? And you have to have a neck like Rob Ford to make it work?

Whale: Well when you say it like that…

Whale shark: <sip> Doesn’t that cost you a bunch of energy? All that lunging and such?

Whale: Oh yeah, totally, 50 times base metabolic rate.  Sometimes I even go anaerobic.  It’s a killer workout.  Check out my pecs…

Whale shark: <sip> No thank you <sip>

Whale: Suit yourself.   You know, you sure do sip a lot…

Whale shark: <sip> That’s just how I roll <sip> At least I can breathe and feed at the same time…

Whale: Wait, what now?

Whale shark: <sip> The same water that carries food into my mouth carries oxygen across my gills.   Unidirectional system.  It’s a symphony of precision and efficiency.  If I understand you correctly, when your mouth is full of water, you can’t even breathe.

Whale: Well no, but we never breathe through our mouths anyway, only ever through the blowhole. Checkit!

The whale blows a towering plume, knocking several autographed pictures of dubious celebrities  off the wall and coating the pendant lights with mucus

Whale shark: Dood!

Whale: Sorry man, I get a bit carried away sometimes. It’s actually pretty cool.  Because our blowholes mainline to our lungs and our mouths go directly to the stomach, anatomically, we can’t choke.  We don’t even have, like, a gag reflex!

Whale shark: <sip> … There are so many things I could say right now… <sip>

Whale: You know what, man, you’re OK.  For a shark I mean. Kinda dull, but OK.  Maybe we’ll hang out.  I gotta show you this thing me and the boys do with bubbles sometimes.

Whale shark: Que sera, sera 

The whale shark quickly finishes his drink and heads off in search of favourable currents.

Whale: Hey thanks man! Mi casa to you too!

___________________________________

Motta PJ, Maslanka M, Hueter RE, Davis RL, de la Parra R, Mulvany SL, Habegger ML, Strother JA, Mara KR, Gardiner JM, Tyminski J, Zeigler LD. Feeding anatomy, filter-feeding rate, and diet of whale sharks Rhincodon typus during surface ram filter feeding off the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Zoology (Jena). 2010 Aug;113(4):199-212. doi: 10.1016/j.zool.2009.12.001.

Potvin J, Goldbogen JA, Shadwick RE (2012) Metabolic Expenditures of Lunge Feeding Rorquals Across Scale: Implications for the Evolution of Filter Feeding and the Limits to Maximum Body Size. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44854. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044854

The post A whale and a whale shark walk into a bar… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In conjunction with the conference, National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry will be speaking at the aquarium on the evening of Tuesday October 8th, with proceeds going to support whale shark research. If you’re interested and around Atlanta at the time, Info and tickets are available here

One really important aspect of the conference will be an IUCN Red List Workshop, at which the global whale shark science community will debate the conservation status of this species.  Right now it is listed as “Vulnerable” and the scientists will be discussing whether there is sufficient cause to ease back to “Threatened”, or whether the data suggest we should remain vulnerable or advance to “Endangered”.

It’s unusual but not unique to devote an international conference to a single species (I once went to a mouth-watering Symposium all about lobsters).  They’re interesting meetings because they cut across all sorts of scientific disciplines like anatomy, natural history, biochemistry, genetics, and conservation, which provides a unique sort of wholistic perspective.  Some papers arising from the conference will be published in PeerJ, so we’re doing our bit for #OpenAccess too.

If you’re interested in following the conference, you can like it on Facebook, or follow Tweets with the hashtag #IWSC3, although to be blunt, whale shark scientists aren’t well represented on twitter, so you may as well just follow me and Simon Pierce :)

I’ll endeavour to send update during or after the conference, but in the meantime, here’s the whale shark emoticon for you all:

:( ) 

The post Cos you can never have too much whale shark first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Mexico is hot.  Yucatan Mexico in August is hotter.  The top of the observation tower at Isla Contoy in August is hotter than Satan’s bike shorts.  Cutting two by fours up there with a vintage rusted hand saw is, as we would say back home,  hard yakka.  I don’t care what kind of cocktails your SoHo “mixologist” proffers for you from the safety barricade of his turtle neck at 2am, there’s only one drink for 2PM on a searing Quintana Roo afternoon when the sun is dogging you like a collection agency: beer. Yes, BEER.  Icy cold, delicious, sweet, bitter beer.  Bring. It. On. May it not touch the sides.  On the boat on the way back to Cancun, Beti busts out cans of Superior that have been secretly chilling all the while we were working at Contoy.   Ahhhh “Te Amo Beti!”, I think out loud; my beer fairy!  The icy sting of frosted can on lips pre-salted with sweat and seawater is as close to the drink of the gods as I know, even with a lingering aftertaste of contaminating Coppertone.

Assuming you don’t have Beti on your boat ensuring a consistent supply of lagers, though, you may need to consider beer cocktails as a facsimile.  Beer cocktails?  You betcha.  Lets start simple with a classic Mexican chelada:

1. Rim an ice cold glass with sea salt
2. Squeeze a quarter of a lime into said glass
3. Tilt and pour in a bottle of icy cold beer of the lager style popular in Mexico (Sol, Pacifico, Corona)
4. En-yoy

Cheladas are a mainstay of the all-inclusive resorts that line the zona hotelera south of Cancun, where folks sip them because, well, you’re supposed to in Mexico.  The truth, though, is that an earned chelada is ten times better than one ordered at leisure.

If, like me, you prefer a bit more meat on your sandwich, though, have you ever tried a michelada?  This is a slightly more derived beer cocktail that comes in a variety of types (and no, I don’t mean that unholy terror that Bud put out, which I refuse to link to).  I have had them in Mexico  with Worcestershire sauce, Maggi sauce, and even some sort of sarsparilla concentrate I didn’t recognise, but my favourite is actually one I used to make up as a breakfast for friends on early morning bass fishing trips to the lake near where we live in north Georgia.

Al’s Allatoona:

1. Take a 20 oz glass (or on the boat, a 24oz travel cup) and add a 12 oz beer.  I use PBR.  What, you got a problem with that?  Take it up with my fist…
2. Add 8-10 oz of clamato.  Yep, this cocktail includes actual seafood. How #DeepSN is THAT?
3. Add a goodly dash of hot sauce (I use a Panamanian sauce called Delidas, which is fantastic), a few drops of Maggi sauce and a liberal squeeze of lime juice
4. Add a 1/4 tsp of fresh squeezed horseradish, or equivalent amount of horseradish sauce
5. Add a dash, only a dash, of mirin.   This is my own modification to add a touch of savoury sweetness.  I pretty much add mirin to everything.
6. You can actually make up the mix (clamato, hot sauce, horseradish, Maggi, lime, mirin) ahead of time and bring that in a juice bottle to mix fresh with the cold beers.
7. Gulp heartily between pinpoint casts to submerged snags

What I love about this is that, like Thai food (and the best of all cuisines, for that matter), it hits every part of the palate: sweet, salty, hot, bitter and umami.  Fan-freakin’ tastic.  Truth be told, though, my buddies weren’t as big a fan of this as I am; Clamato isn’t for everyone.  If you’re already gagging at the very thought of seafood and alcoholic beverages, then over to Cartman.

Let’s say you’ve got a couple of cervezas under your belt and you’re ready to kick it up a notch.  May I recommend a tequilita and sangrita?  OK, I get that tequila scares a lot of folks, but I honestly think it’s because they’ve been drinking CRAP tequila.  Here’s a hint – if you need to “lick, shoot, suck”, then you’re drinking the wrong tequila.  Seriously.  There are as many good tequilas out there to try now as there are single malt scotches.  A really good tequila you will want to drink from a snifter, I kid you not.  If I can recommend just two to try, I suggest you look for Maestro Numero Uno Anejo (my all time fave) and Don Julio Setenta, a very unusual but delicious clear anejo.  If you can’t find these, though, lots of bars will have an ice cold bottle of Tradicional in the freezer, and “Quisiera una tequilita frio” will get you on on a path to happiness rapido.

In between tequilas, there’s a terrific idea called sangrita that I hadn’t met until a little while ago.  These are palate-clearing shots of fruity, tomato-based, um, stuff.  Look, it’s better if I just give you the recipe, which comes from a little bar at the old bull ring in Cancun centro.  It’s going to sound crazy but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

1. 6oz tomato juice
2. 2ox pineapple juice
3. 1 oz lime juice
4. 2 dashes grenadine
5. 1 dash tabasco sauce
6. 1 dash worcestershire sauce
7. 1 dash Maggi seasoning
8. 1/4 tsp sea salt

Serve in shot glasses with each tequila shot.

I’m sure there was supposed to be some marine science in this post, but I seem to have got totally distracted on alcoholic beverages.   How did that happen?  On second thoughts, don’t answer that, just wipe the tropical sweat from your forehead before it stings your eyes and try one of the above to alleviate the heat.

The post Forget 5 o’clock… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post TGIF – Handy with a knife first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The story behind the study is as long (or rather, short) as the history of Georgia Aquarium itself, which only opened in 2005.  The aquarium currently houses 4 whale sharks (two male and two female).   During the illnesses of the Aquarium’s first two male whale sharks in 2006 and 2007, the husbandry and veterinary services departments at Georgia Aquarium rapidly developed techniques needed for diagnosis and veterinary intervention with whale sharks because, as you may imagine, no such techniques existed at that time.  Principal among the needs of veterinarians was the ability to obtain blood samples.  Blood is the vital fluid in most animals and its analysis can tell vets and scientists all sorts of things about what is happening internally.  In our case the team was hampered by a lack of baseline knowledge – no one had taken blood from whale sharks before so there was nothing to compare to.  Complicating matters, some of the chemistry tests normally performed with animal blood were not as helpful when applied to whale sharks.  This was not a huge surprise, since these tests are typically developed for terrestrial animals, and so we were using a mammal-shaped peg for an elasmobranch-shaped hole, so to speak.  Nonetheless, during the course of their illness we accumulated a freezer bank full of blood samples – a truly unique collection – and afterwards we published a paper describing the blood cells and basic chemistry and I determined at some future time to give more attention to the issue of whale shark blood chemistry.

I had heard from a colleague of an approach called metabolomics, which allows you to ask open-ended or “discovery based” questions like “what compounds are present in this sample?”.  Metabolomic tools allow you to determine the presence, and sometimes concentration, of all the smaller molecular weight compounds (i.e. smaller than proteins) in a sample, things like amino acids, sugars, non-peptide hormones and signaling molecules.  These are the ultimate products of all the metabolic processes that are taking place inside the animal.  If genomics provides the blueprint of a machine, then metabolomics provides the operational performance figures: the end products of all that tanscription, translation and metabolism.  Metabolomic techniques include  methods like nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS) that can determine what is in a fluid sample without knowing ahead of time.  I was keen to try it and was thrilled to learn that there were folks who could do both NMR and MS just walking distance down the road at Georgia Tech.  So began a fascinating collaboration that has lasted the last three years and culminated in the paper released today.

I’m not going to go into the details of how we analysed the samples, in large part because I wouldn’t do it justice because I am not an analytical chemist. If you like that kind of stuff, I invite you to indulge in the methodology section of our paper.  Briefly, though: the NMR analysis determines the structure of compounds in the solution by pinging the sample with radio waves in a strong magnetic field, more here, while the MS analysis ionizes the compounds (adds or knocks off an electron) and then sends them whizzing by a detector that can measure their mass and electrical charge, more here.  The upshot is that the NMR gave us a sort of “low res” look at what was present but with quantities, while the MS gave us good lists of the compounds present, but no information on how much of each.  Combined with the right sort of statistical methods, the two techniques turned out to be nicely complementary.

So what did we learn?

Well, surprise surprise, whale shark blood proved to be very different from mammal blood.  That was sort of a tautological  finding, since it was that difference that prompted the study in the first place.  We were surprised, however, exactly how different and what a poor match we got when we ran our NMR data against available (mammal-derived) online databases of metabolites.  It’s not that the compounds we discovered were totally new to science, just that they were not previously known from sharks and/or that they occurred in new and surprising combinations and concentrations.  This finding tells us that when it comes to understanding whale sharks, and sharks in general, we really do have to go back to the drawing board in a lot of senses.  Thankfully these very same powerful analytical techniques mean we can catch up pretty quickly.

Secondly, we showed that you can tell a healthy whale shark from an unhealthy one based on their overall blood chemistry.  One would hope so, so this was good confirmation that the technique was working correctly.

Thirdly, and perhaps most interestingly, we discovered a number of compounds that correlate well with whale shark health status.  Of these, the best was homarine, which is similar to one of the Vitamin B compounds.  What does it do in whale sharks? We don’t know, because this was the first time it had been reported from a shark!  However, some studies in other species say it acts as a pool of methyl groups (-CH₃) that can be added or subtracted from other compounds in any number of important biochemical reactions.  It’s my guess that in whale sharks it gives and receives methyls from a compound called TMAO, which is very important to sharks because it protects them from the toxic effects of all the urea in their blood.  In other words, homarine may help keep their blood from becoming toxic, and a deficiency of homarine might mean a whale shark is less able to protect itself from urea toxicity (admittedly, there’s a lot of mights and maybes in that speculation).

Analysing chemical compounds in whale shark blood might seem pretty esoteric, but there are several good reasons to care about these sorts of studies.  First, it brings us a big first step towards understanding the internal biology of the largest species of the largest class of vertebrates.  Even though it’s the biggest fish in the world, it’s hard for me to overstate how deficient our knowledge was of whale shark internal biology, except to say that this is a species so large and intractable that its biochemistry was effectively off limits to science until only just a couple of years ago.  Now, by applying these advanced analytical techniques to an aquarium population, so much has been revealed all at once.  In a biochemical sense, it’s a bit like being handed the Hubble telescope: things that were frustratingly hidden are suddenly revealed in clear contrast, so much, in fact, that it will actually take some time to make sense of it all.  A second good reason to care is that, simply by virtue of being so different, whale sharks (and sharks in general) provide a comparative context that helps us understand our own biochemistry.  I mean, if everyone worked the way mammals do, it would be a pretty boring biochemical world, but whale sharks show us that this is certainly not the case.  By showing how evolution has produced manifold elegant solutions to biochemical problems, we get a new fundamental perspective on how life works.  Finally, while there are only a handful of them in the world, the people who look after whale sharks, both in aquariums and wild populations, can certainly benefit from a better understanding of how they work on the inside, which can only complement all those wonderful natural history studies that have accumulated in recent years.

The study we did was one of the most satisfying collaborations I’ve had the privilege to be a part of, in large part because the skills of all involved were so different and yet so vital to the success of the project.  Harry Webb did a terrific amount of organizational work to keep things on track at the aquarium end.  Dr. Les Gelbaum and Dr. Johannes Leisen designed and conducted the NMR experiments and Hanno also did a lot of the bioinformatics.  Dr. Facundo Fernandez and Dr. Masnhui Zhou worked analytical wonders with mass spectrometry, and Dr. Julia Kubanek helped us all speak to each other since she has a foot in both the analytical and biological worlds; she also supervised Krista Lim-Hing, the excellent undergrad student who worked on the project.  Finally, the guru of environmental metabolomics, Dr. Mark Viant, and his post-doc Dr. Jonathan Byrne helped immensely to ensure the quality of the data and analyses.

So where to now with whale shark metabolomics?  Well, I’d love to know more about what homarine is doing, so if you are a biochemist, by all means chime in with ideas in the comments.  Indeed, if you see other things in the paper that stand out, lets hear it; I would start with the other biomarker compounds in Table 2.  My sincere hope is that among the data lie other such interesting patterns that imply important biochemical processes for the world’s largest fish, and we plan to keep mining them for some time.  To help with that, I’m also working with data visualization experts on a tool that would help share the data openly and allow anyone to look for patterns.  I’m sorry it isn’t ready yet; I try to remain – ahem – sanguine about it, but there are so many great questions and just so few hours in the day!

The post A first look at the biochemistry of whale sharks first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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