Heart of the Nation: Ningaloo Reef
In times when it seems like the human race is going off the rails, photographs like this are a balm for the soul, don’t you think?
Imagine if you were visiting Planet Earth and you wanted to understand the human race – but the only specimens you had were teenage boys. You’d end up with a pretty skewed picture, right? It’s the same for whale shark researchers, says the University of Western Australia’s Dr Mark Meekan, a leader in this field. The whale sharks that gather at Ningaloo from March to August every year – and at other inshore feeding events around the world – are all juvenile males. Plenty is known about them. But the females and the big, mature individuals are shrouded in mystery: they stay out in the deep ocean. “Only one pregnant female has ever been found, in a Taiwanese fishery in the late ’90s,” Meekan says, “so everything we know about their reproduction is from that single observation.” And while whale sharks are known to grow over 18m, encounters with the leviathans are vanishingly rare, he says. “No one has seen a really big one – in excess of 15-16m – since 2001.”
Still, there’s plenty to admire about the young males that visit Ningaloo every year to feast on the tropical krill that bloom with the seasonal strengthening of the Leeuwin Current. They’re fast-growing and ravenous (again, like teenage boys) and they cruise around with their vast maws open, filter-feeding on the bounty. “Like giant vacuum cleaners,” says Meekan with affection. Ollie Clarke, a dive photographer from Exmouth, shot this 6m individual on a day when sunbeams were dancing through the water column. Isn’t the light, and the sense of space, gorgeous?
When the glut of tropical krill tails off in August, nearly all of these young males migrate thousands of kilometres north, heading for eastern Indonesia, before returning the next year. They’ll sometimes dive really deep – almost two kilometres down – during their migration, which Meekan believes is to do with navigation. “We think that deep-diving allows them to better sense the magnetic banding in the Earth’s crust, so they know where they are,” he explains.
Beauty, mystery, wonder… in times when it seems like the human race is going off the rails, photographs like this are a balm for the soul, don’t you think?