A shark with 15 meters length, and weighs about 12 tons and is swimming directly behind you. Stay calm and try not to look or smell like phytoplankton. These sharks don’t like meat – at least that’s what the guides told you after you paid $225 for 30 minutes of swimming with these giant whale sharks in the Georgia Aquarium in downtown Atlanta.
Their mouths – wide enough to swallow a Volkswagen - are lined with 350 teeth, but they’re for sifting rather than chomping. When the shark expels a mouthful of water through its gills, those teeth hold back all the tasty stuff to be swallowed. They are the largest fish in the sea, but they eat only krill, macro-algae, plankton and small squid or vertebrates that get sucked in to their huge mouths while they filter feed.
You’ll learn all this during 90 minutes of preliminary instructions and education before plunging into the 10-metre-deep pool containing 6.3 million gallons of sea water. It’s the only place in the world where you can snorkel or scuba dive with whale sharks, unless you fall overboard far from shore in some tropical sea.
Don’t touch. That’s the first rule when swimming with these gentle giants. Three guides accompany six guest swimmers at a time in the tank and one of the guides is vide taping your experience so you can buy the DVD when you’re back on terra firma.
