The World's Biggest Shark Isn't Actually a Carnivore, Scientists Discover

There's more to the reputation of the biggest shark in the ocean than we thought. The whale sharks are thought to comb the waters for small animals.

Greens consisting of algae and other photosynthesizing organisms are among the many tiny swimmers they pick up.

This can't be avoided, but researchers have wondered if this vegetation is just a side salad for the carnivore, or if it is needed to keep it swimming

Researchers looked at poop and skin samples to see what the ocean hoovers were using from the giant pools of water they slurp through their systems.

The poop showed that they were eating something. They aren't metabolizing a lot of it.

whale sharks, which are true sharks with cartilage instead of bones, seem to be getting a lot of nutrition from a lot ofalgae.

Mark Meekan of the Australian Institute of Marine Science says that this causes them to rethink what whale sharks eat. What they are doing in the open ocean.

The analysis showed that the fatty acid profile was more consistent with omnivory. They found skin rich in arachidonic acid which is only present in large quantities to explain the levels found in whale sharks.

Tissue samples show that whale sharks are feeding off organisms that are low on the food chain. They are not the only sharks that are omnivores.

These animals are called shovelheads because they often swallow plant materials as a result of hunting small prey like crabs, mollusks, and fish. Their ability to digest plant material is likely due to their need to deal with it.

The whale sharks may have had the same thing happen. They may have been chugging down algae to digest the animals that live on it, but now they can also digest and use the algae itself.

There is more to the story than the vision of whale sharks coming to Ningaloo to feast on little krill. They're out there eating a lot of seaweed.

The whale sharks have to follow the surface currents that gather the floating food sources together to find enough of it. The whale sharks end up accidentally eating the pollutants in the ocean because of the same features.

Some of the plastic is passing through to the whale shark. The team notes in their paper that it's likely to reduce their gut capacity, slow their digestion or cause them to eat more than they need to. Over the past 75 years, the population of these animals has plummeted.

All the big animals have always been herbivores. We used to think that whales and whale sharks were feeding on shrimp and small fishes in the sea.

It turns out that the system of evolution on land and in the water is the same.

The research was published in a journal.