Whale Sharks: A Photographer’s Guide to the Largest Fish in the Ocean

Diving with whale sharks

By William Drumm, underwater photographer and ocean ambassador

The largest fish on Earth eats some of the smallest things in it, cannot bite you, and is covered in a pattern of spots that works like a fingerprint. No two whale sharks carry the same arrangement, and researchers identify individuals by feeding photographs of their flanks into pattern matching software that was originally written for astronomers to map stars.

I have photographed them in Mexico and elsewhere, and the thing that gets me every time is the calm. A forty foot animal goes past you at walking pace and does not care that you are there.

Are Whale Sharks Whales or Sharks?

They are sharks. Whale sharks are fish, not mammals. They breathe through gills, their skeleton is cartilage rather than bone, and they never come to the surface for air. Whales are mammals that breathe with lungs. The two are not closely related in any meaningful sense.

The name is a description, not a classification. Whale sharks earned it twice over: they are whale sized, and they feed the way a baleen whale feeds, by filtering enormous volumes of water for very small food. That is unusual behaviour for a shark, and it is why the name stuck.

Whale shark vs basking shark

Whale sharks get confused with basking sharks, which is fair enough, because they are the only two really large filter feeding sharks in the ocean. They are easy to separate once you know what you are looking at.

• Size. Whale sharks are bigger. They are the largest fish alive. Basking sharks, at roughly 26 to 33 feet, are the second largest.
• Markings. Whale sharks are covered in white spots and stripes. Basking sharks are plain grey brown with no pattern at all.
• Water. Whale sharks live in tropical and subtropical seas. Basking sharks prefer cool temperate water, the North Atlantic, the Pacific Northwest, the Mediterranean. Their ranges barely overlap.
• Feeding. Whale sharks actively pump water through their gills, and can hang almost vertically at the surface to do it. Basking sharks are passive: they swim forward with the mouth open and let the water do the work.

What Is a Whale Shark?

Rhincodon typus is the only living member of its family. It is a slow moving, warm water, filter feeding shark with a mouth at the front of its head rather than underneath, which is unusual, and it has been doing this essentially unchanged for a very long time.

How Big Are Whale Sharks?

Most whale sharks you will actually meet run 20 to 40 feet. That is already a lot of animal, and in the water it is more than the number suggests.

The record is bigger than most articles will tell you. The largest reliably recorded whale shark measured 18.8 metres, about 61.7 feet, taken off India in the Arabian Sea. You will see 41 feet quoted a great deal as the maximum. It is not. Adults can push toward 20 tons.

There is no reference for size underwater, which is why almost every whale shark photograph worth looking at has a diver in it. Without a person in frame, a 40 foot animal and a 20 foot animal are the same picture.

Whale Shark Anatomy

• Mouth: around 5 feet across, and sitting at the front of the head rather than slung underneath like most sharks. This is one of the quickest ways to know you are looking at a whale shark.
• Teeth: roughly 300 rows of them, somewhere near 3,000 teeth in total, each one a few millimetres long. None of them do anything. They are vestigial and play no part in feeding.
• Eyes: small, set far out on the sides of the head, and genuinely bizarre. Whale shark eyeballs are covered in tiny tooth like denticles, which is unique among vertebrates, and the animal can retract the eye into the socket for protection.
• Skin: thick, tough, and covered in the dermal denticles all sharks have. It feels like coarse sandpaper, and you should not be finding that out by touching one.
• Spot pattern: unique to the individual, like a fingerprint, and stable over its lifetime.
• Tail: huge and asymmetric. It sweeps slowly and it moves the animal at about 3 mph, which does not sound like much until you are trying to keep up with one.

How Do Whale Sharks Eat?

They filter. A whale shark takes in an enormous volume of water, strains out the plankton, krill, fish eggs, squid and small schooling fish with internal gill rakers, and pushes the water back out through the gills. When food is dense enough they will hang almost vertically in the water column and pump, mouth at the surface, feeding in one place.

Watching it happen is oddly industrial. There is nothing predatory about it at all. It is a very large animal quietly processing the sea.

Where Do Whale Sharks Live?

Tropical and subtropical water, worldwide, roughly in a band around the equator. What matters for anyone hoping to see one is not the range but the aggregations: whale sharks gather in specific places at specific times of year, wherever the plankton is thick enough to be worth the trip, and those gatherings are predictable enough to plan a holiday around. One of the most dependable is Gladden Spit in Belize, where whale sharks show up around the spring full moons to feed on snapper spawn.

They also migrate a very long way between them, thousands of miles, and we are still learning where individual animals go.

How Long Do Whale Sharks Live?

Somewhere between 70 and 100 years, and possibly longer. They grow slowly and do not breed until around 25 to 30 years of age. A long life and a very slow reproductive rate is a good strategy right up until something starts killing you faster than you can replace yourself, at which point it is the worst possible strategy. That is the whole conservation problem in one sentence.

Do Whale Sharks Have Predators?

For a long time the answer was effectively no. That changed recently, and the story is remarkable.

In 2024, researchers published documentation of a pod of orcas in the southern Gulf of California that has specialised in hunting whale sharks. The pod works as a unit: they strike the shark to flip it upside down, which puts it into tonic immobility and leaves it helpless, then hit the pelvic area to open it up and get at the liver, which is enormous and rich in oil. Four separate hunts were recorded between 2018 and 2024. A male orca the researchers named Moctezuma was present at three of them. All the whale sharks taken were juveniles of around 5 to 6 metres.

That is the same body of water I photograph mobula rays in, and I have been in with orcas hunting rays off La Ventana. It is a strange thing to know that the animals I was watching, or animals very like them, worked out how to kill the biggest fish in the ocean.

Beyond orcas, an adult whale shark has essentially nothing to fear from other animals. Every genuine threat to the species is human.

Conservation Status

The IUCN moved whale sharks from Vulnerable to Endangered in 2016, and the reasons are all familiar: targeted fishing and bycatch, the fin trade, ship strikes in busy coastal water, and plastic moving up through the plankton they spend their lives filtering. A filter feeder in a plastic ocean is in a particularly bad position.

The one thing genuinely working in their favour is tourism. A whale shark that people pay to swim with is worth more alive, repeatedly, than it is worth once. That is a blunt argument and it happens to be true.

A note on whale sharks in aquariums

Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta is the only aquarium in the United States to have kept whale sharks, starting in 2005, and it sells a swim with programme. It is contested within marine biology, for reasons that are not complicated: these are animals that cross oceans, and several have died at the facility.

Everything on this page is about wild whale sharks. That is where I work, and it is also, for roughly the same money, the better experience and the better outcome. A wild encounter funds the people protecting the animal.

Where to Swim With Whale Sharks

This is the rare bucket list animal that is genuinely accessible. Whale sharks are slow, calm, uninterested in you, and found near the surface, which means you need a snorkel and a pair of fins and nothing else. No scuba certification. No cage. No bait.

Two rules, wherever you go. Do not touch the animal, and do not get behind the tail. Pick an operator who enforces both and who caps the number of people in the water at once. The good ones will tell you their rules before you ask.

Mexico: Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Holbox

From roughly mid May to mid September, whale sharks gather off the northeastern tip of the Yucatan in one of the largest aggregations known anywhere, with the peak usually in July and August. Boats run from Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Holbox. Expect somewhere in the region of 150 to 250 USD for a full day. Warm water, sharks at the surface, and about as close to a guarantee as wildlife ever gets. If you are coming from the United States, this is the easy one.

Mexico: La Paz, Baja California Sur

La Paz runs a smaller but very reliable season in the Bahia de La Paz, roughly October through April, and it costs less, generally around 80 to 150 USD. The water is cooler than the Yucatan and the encounters are just as close.

It is also 45 minutes from La Ventana, which makes it easy to bolt onto a Baja trip. If you time it right you can put whale sharks, sea lions and the mobula ray aggregation at La Ventana into one week, and Cabo Pulmo is a couple of hours south of that.

Philippines: Donsol

Donsol, in Sorsogon, runs December to May and is built around research, with hard no touch rules and a cap on daily encounters. Go here.

Oslob, on Cebu, runs year round and it does so by feeding the sharks, which holds them in one place and changes their behaviour. It is popular and it is cheap and I would not recommend it. If the sharks are being fed, you are not watching wild animals.

Australia: Ningaloo Reef

March to July, on the west coast. Western Australia runs what is probably the strictest and best managed whale shark programme in the world, with observer only protocols and real enforcement. Clear water, healthy reef, reliable animals. Expensive, and worth it.

The Maldives

The South Ari Atoll holds resident whale sharks year round, which makes the Maldives the one destination where you are not chasing a season. Encounters tend to be long and close. Most resorts in the southern atolls will run the trip.

And a few more

• Tofo, Mozambique. October to April, peaking November to February. Visibility is a lottery. The animals are reliable.
• Utila, Honduras. March to May, with a smaller run in September and October. Fewer encounters than Mexico, excellent dive infrastructure.
• Galapagos. June to November, liveaboard only, and largely enormous pregnant females. A different kind of trip entirely.
• Djibouti. October to February, in the Gulf of Tadjoura. Small, quiet, mostly juveniles.

What It Is Like in the Water With One

You see it from the surface first. A shadow, or the slow sway of a tail, and then the shape resolves and it is much bigger than the shadow suggested.

Once you are in, the first thing you notice is how calm everything is. Whale sharks move with a steady, unhurried motion, and they will often let you swim with them for several minutes while they carry on feeding as though you are not there, which you are not, in any way that matters to them. Remoras and small fish ride along beneath, using the shark for cover and picking off what drifts past. When the plankton is dense the shark will circle back through the same patch of water repeatedly, which gives you pass after pass.

Good operators brief hard and mean it: no touching, keep clear of the tail, stay out of the animal’s path. Those rules exist because a whale shark cannot get out of your way and will not think to try.

Photographing Whale Sharks

Whale sharks are among the most photographed sharks in the ocean, because they are reliably in known places at known times. Which means the hard part is not finding one. The hard part is coming back with a frame that has not already been taken ten thousand times.

A few things I have learned the hard way.

They are faster than they look. That tail is enormous and it barely seems to move, and you will still be finning flat out to stay level with the animal. Bring good fins, and turn your body sideways at the surface so your fins are not slapping air instead of water.

Put a person in the frame. Without a diver for scale, nobody can tell whether they are looking at a forty foot shark or a small one. The person is the picture.

Stop shooting the side. Most whale shark images are a profile with the tail cropped off. Get low, get underneath, get in front and let it come to you. The interesting compositions are almost always the ones nobody is standing in position for.

If you want the longer version of how I got into this, I wrote about how to become an underwater photographer. Prints from these trips are in the shop, and a portion of every sale goes to marine conservation.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Whale Sharks

Are whale sharks whales or sharks?

They are sharks. Whale sharks are fish. They breathe through gills, they have a cartilage skeleton, and they lay eggs internally, all of which makes them a shark and not a whale. Whales are air breathing mammals. The name comes from the size and from the filter feeding, which is the sort of thing a baleen whale does, not the sort of thing most sharks do.

How big are whale sharks?

Most whale sharks you will meet in the water are 20 to 40 feet long. The largest reliably recorded individual measured 18.8 metres, about 61.7 feet, caught off India in the Arabian Sea. Adults can weigh in the region of 20 tons. Whale sharks are the largest fish alive and the largest non mammal vertebrate on Earth.

What is the difference between a whale shark and a basking shark?

They are the two big filter feeding sharks and they are easy to separate. Whale sharks are larger, covered in a distinctive pattern of white spots and stripes, and live in tropical and subtropical water. Basking sharks are plain grey brown, top out around 26 to 33 feet, and prefer cooler temperate seas. Whale sharks actively pump water through their gills. Basking sharks simply swim with their mouths open and let the water flow through. Their ranges barely overlap.

What do whale sharks eat?

Plankton, krill, small schooling fish such as anchovies and sardines, squid, and fish eggs. They feed by taking in huge volumes of water and straining the food out through internal gill rakers, then pushing the water back out through the gills. They have around 300 rows of tiny teeth, roughly 3,000 of them, and none of them are used for feeding.

Where do whale sharks live?

In tropical and subtropical water worldwide. The reliable aggregation sites are the Yucatan coast of Mexico from roughly May to September, La Paz in Baja California Sur from about October to April, Donsol in the Philippines, Ningaloo Reef in Australia, the South Ari Atoll in the Maldives, Tofo in Mozambique, and Utila in Honduras. Individuals migrate thousands of miles between feeding sites.

Do whale sharks have predators?

Yes, and this is newer knowledge than most sources suggest. A study published in 2024 documented a pod of orcas in the southern Gulf of California that specialises in hunting whale sharks. The orcas work together to flip the shark upside down, which immobilises it, then strike the pelvic area to reach the lipid rich liver. Four separate hunts were recorded between 2018 and 2024, all on juvenile whale sharks of about 5 to 6 metres. Beyond orcas, adult whale sharks have almost no natural predators. Every serious threat they face is human.

How long do whale sharks live?

Probably 70 to 100 years, possibly longer. They grow slowly and do not reach breeding age until somewhere around 25 to 30 years old. That combination, a long life and very slow reproduction, is exactly why the species recovers so poorly once numbers fall.

Are whale sharks endangered?

Yes. The IUCN moved whale sharks from Vulnerable to Endangered in 2016. The threats are fishing, both targeted and as bycatch, the shark fin trade, ship strikes in busy coastal water, and plastic pollution moving through the plankton they filter. Well managed swim with tourism is one of the few forces working in their favour, because it makes a living whale shark worth more than a dead one.

Are whale sharks dangerous to humans?

No. They are filter feeders with a top speed of roughly 3 mph and no ability or interest to bite anything your size. Snorkelling with them is safe for ordinary swimmers and needs no scuba certification. The only real hazard is the tail, which is enormous and does not know you are there, so stay off the back end.

Where can I swim with whale sharks?

The most accessible sites are Cancun, Holbox and Isla Mujeres in Mexico from around mid May to mid September; La Paz in Baja California Sur from about October to April; Donsol in the Philippines from December to May; Ningaloo Reef in Australia from March to July; the Maldives year round in the South Ari Atoll; Tofo in Mozambique from October to April; and Utila in Honduras from March to May. Choose an operator that enforces no touch rules and caps how many swimmers go in at once.

When is whale shark season in Cancun?

Roughly mid May to mid September, peaking in July and August, when whale sharks gather off the northeastern Yucatan in one of the largest known aggregations on Earth. Boats leave from Cancun, Holbox and Isla Mujeres. Full day trips generally run in the region of 150 to 250 USD per person.

When is whale shark season in La Paz, Mexico?

Roughly October through April in the Bahia de La Paz, on the Sea of Cortez, with the shoulders of the season often the most reliable. Trips leave from the La Paz waterfront and typically run somewhere around 80 to 150 USD per person. La Paz is about 45 minutes from La Ventana, so it slots neatly into a Baja trip built around mobula rays or Cabo Pulmo.

How do scientists identify individual whale sharks?

By the spots. Every whale shark carries a unique pattern of white spots and stripes behind the gills, and it works like a fingerprint. Researchers photograph the pattern and match it using software originally written to map stars. Anyone can contribute: platforms such as Wildbook for Whale Sharks accept photographs from divers and snorkellers, and a holiday snapshot can genuinely end up in a scientific dataset.

Should I swim with whale sharks at an aquarium?

Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta is the only aquarium in the United States to have held whale sharks, starting in 2005, and it sells a swim with programme. It is contested. Whale sharks are migratory animals that cross oceans, and several have died at the facility. Wild encounters in Mexico, the Philippines, Australia or the Maldives cost about the same, put money into local conservation, and show you the animal doing what it evolved to do.