Scuba team snaps underwater photos of whale shark (PHOTOS and VIDEO)

Capt. Mark Christy is the latest to catch a whale shark on film. Unlike other sightings, Christy snapped photos of the whopper fish while underwater. Christy offer this report:

"These where all taken while diving in Destin on board the Dive Vessel 'Sea Cobra' with ScubaTech. It was Saturday afternoon and we were diving first on the Air Force Barge and then the Main Stack of the Bridge Rubble.

On the Air Force Barge we encountered the first whale shark, the small one of the two around 15 to 17 feet in length. We then moved the boat over to the Main Stack of the Bridge Rubble and encountered two whale sharks...[Link]

Marine biologist Andy Dehart, shark advisor to Discovery Channel "Shark Week", dives right in

There's no place Andy Dehart would rather be than in the middle of a feeding frenzy in a thrashing pack of sharks.

Dehart has a day job as the director of biological programs at the National Aquarium in Washington, D.C., but for the past two years, he's taken his mission into living rooms across the U.S.

A veteran who swam with sharks on "over a thousand dives" over twenty years, Dehart has been the Discovery Channel's shark advisor for the past two years.

And in the midst of "Shark Week," this is a time of year that's better than Christmas or Thanksgiving...[Link]

Mandalay Bay’s Shark Dive at Las Vegas

Las Vegas has many oxymorons…but scuba diving in sin city may take the cake. Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef Aquarium scuba program opened June 2009, to certified divers for a down under experience like no other.

In the 1.3 million gallon salt-water aquarium you can enjoy a private dive with 30 + sharks, green sea turtles, green sawfish, rays, and reef fish. Many of the sharks are large, over 6 feet long.

Diving with these sharks is a bit of shark therapy. You will learn the behavior of sharks while in a safe surrounding. Not only is the environment safe but extra safety features including chain maille, a high-tech metal suit that sharks are unable to bite through, helps to ease the mind. Also, there are 2 dive instructors swimming with you, watching and guiding you through the tank. Prior to the dive there is an extensive briefing, for an educational overview and proper protocol while swimming in the aquarium...[Link]

Whale Shark Festival - July 2009 at Isla Mujeres, Mexico

The second annual Whale Shark Festival at Isla Mujeres, Mexico is scheduled to take place from July 15–19, 2009. Located off the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Isla Mujeres may be extremely hot during the summer, but guests will have plenty of opportunities to cool off by immersing themselves in the cool, blue Caribbean waters.

Lasting five days, the Whale Shark Festival celebrates island culture, drawing thousands of visitors to the island to learn about the largest fish in the world Currently listed as an endangered species, whale sharks can reach up to 40 feet in length and weigh up to 15 tons.

Highlighting the festival is the unforgettable experience of swimming with whale sharks, which are considered to be filter eaters and pose no immediate threat to humans. Daily excursions take guests to an area where whale sharks congregate, providing swimmers with a rare opportunity to spend time with these large and powerful animals. Accompanying swimmers are fully licensed guides that are also expert divers...[Link]

Mexico: Swim with whale sharks in the Yucatan

Whale sharks, the largest of the ocean’s fish, are spending time in the warm waters off the Yucatan Peninsula during these summer days. Can you blame them? Probably not. Wanna join them?

These flat-headed, gargantuan creatures (up to 40 feet long, according to National Geographic) snack on plankton and small fish — and not humans — so swimming with them, though they move around open-mouthed, may not be as preposterous as you might think.

With Rosewood Mayakobá, on Mexico’s Riviera Maya, you can embark on a half-day guided tour by private yacht to seek out whale sharks. Once they’ve been found, you get to swim and snorkel with the fish...[Link]

Swimming with basking sharks in Cornwall

Sharks are one of the great joys of British coastal life. Not, of course, the nasty ones, the great whites of Jaws or those other two oceanic ultra-aggressors, the bull and tiger shark, but the outsize yet benign basking shark.

Basking sharks usually appear off British waters from early summer onwards. They should arrive at my local beach, Porthcurno, in west Cornwall, any time now, drawn by the plankton that is borne landwards as the sea warms up.

They are remarkable, beautiful creatures, capable of breaching entirely, but more likely to glide slowly on the surface, cavernous jaw open, passively filtering plankton and small fish from up to 2,000 tonnes of water an hour Their sheer size — the basking shark is the second-largest shark, eclipsed only by the whale shark — has always made me nervous of getting up close and personal with them...[TimesOnline]

Study sheds new light on whale sharks

Scientists have discovered that whale sharks, the biggest fish in the ocean, get around — as in really get around.

A just-released study by Chicago-based geneticist Jennifer Schmidt found that the bus-sized sharks not only swim across oceans, they apparently breed with their counterparts in far-flung areas of the globe.

Schmidt, a University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of biological sciences, now wants to expand the study by taking DNA samples from the four whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium in downtown Atlanta. The aquarium houses the only captive whale sharks outside of Asia.

The world’s biggest indoor aquarium obtained its whale sharks from Taiwan, an area not covered by Schmidt’s DNA study of 68 whale sharks in the wild.

“The opportunity to characterize these sharks genetically would nicely complement the existing study,” Schmidt said.

The study by Schmidt and her colleagues is one of the most comprehensive to date on the little-understood shark. It sheds new light on the behavior of the polka-dotted, filter-feeding giant that can reach 50 feet in length and weigh more than 20 tons...[AJC.com]