Bills channel does some investigating on a viral video that’s cause a huge debate: As a lot of you already know, whale sharks are the biggest fish in the sea and I always thought they were gentle giants- until I saw this!
The video was sent in by Amanda Yee and Karen Fraley and Spokas Spokencijus. It shows what looks like a huge and angry whale shark going after a diver.
But is this video real? Or is this just another big fat whale of a fake? Why don’t we get on our goggles and see what we can find out!
Simon Pierce’s amazing photos here http://www.simonjpierce.com
Link to original “Whale shark Attacks Diver” video:
I looked around on the internet, and it looks like it was first uploaded by 72Herminator. It had almost a million views at the time of this video, but the comments didn’t offer very much insight. There wasn’t any information in the description. It didn’t even tell us whether the diver was injured or not.
It was right about then, that I decided to get in touch with my team of researchers -The Chewy Piranhas.
Kyle Darkova quickly pointed out that Whale Sharks are not meat eaters so it must be fake, but Prom proposed the Whale Shark was acting out of anger after being threatened by the Diver.
Prom’s point makes sense to me. Elephants aren’t meat eaters but there are plenty of videos showing what happens when they get angry! Maybe it really was an attack?
The only man I know who could really nail this down is
Marine Biologist and Whale Shark Scientist, Simon Pierce. Simon’s studied Whale Sharks for decades, and thanks to him, I was able to come up with this. The official answer…
BILL READS NOTE:
The video claiming to show a whale shark attacking a diver has been thoroughly examined. Based on all the evidence presented, we agree with whale shark scientist Simon J Pierce. While there is no alteration of the video itself, the claim that the whale shark is attacking the diver, is nothing more than a big fat fake.
SIMON PIERCE: Real video but the interpretation is wrong.
Well at least we know the guy didn’t get hurt – which then leads me to my next question? What’s really going on here?
SIMON: So the video gave me a pretty good laugh… It intrigued me why the whale shark was behaving so strangely…
BILL: Simon noticed a word in the description which helped him figure out this took place.
SIMON: This is in a place called Cenderawasih Bay and that’s actually the place where Whale sharks are used to getting fed fish by people.
BILL: Now the reason they are used to being fed fish turns out to be really interesting… listen to this:
SIMON: There in Nabiri, a lot of fishermen catch small fish in nets and the whale sharks would try to suck the fish out of the nets, so to stop the whale sharks from destroying the gear they started feeding them fish.
BILL: Ok, now the trick turned out to be successful and everyone was happy… but what happened was the tourists found out about this and then they started feeding whale sharks as well.
SIMON: So what’s happening here ( in the video) is the sharks are used to being fed by people and the diver is in the water and the shark wants to get some food…
BILL: So the shark is like where’s my free fish handout? And the diver is like, “I don’t have any fish… nobody told me to bring any… get away from me!”
SIMON: Whale sharks are not dangerous to people, they are not adapted to eating fish larger than a few centimeters. They don’t have teeth.
BILL: Well that’s all the time I have for this video, I want to thank the Chewy Piranhas and Simon J. Pierce for helping me out on this one… and guys if you want to see some really cool whale shark pictures, stop by Simon’s website. Once again, here is the link http://www.simonjpierce.com/
