The whale shark is a fish and it is the largest fish in the world.
KARACHI: This is with reference to a report in your newspaper of October 18 titled “From dead fish to national heritage: Karachi’s whale shark’s journey nearly complete”.
The photograph accompanying the reports labels the animal a “mammal”. The whale shark is a fish and it is the largest fish in the world. Sharks do not have blowholes or mammary glands like marine mammals do, and sharks have skeletons made of cartilage, not the regular bones found on whales. Although whale sharks do give birth to live young, this is not a mammalian characteristic.
Whale sharks are, in fact, ovoviviparous: the eggs develop inside the body feeding off yolk and then are birthed when ready. Whale sharks are only named so because they are equal in size to some whale species.
Aadil Ahmed Siddiqi
Published in The Express Tribune, October 21st, 2012.
