Biology and Behaviour
Introduction
The basking shark, scientific name Cetorhinus maximus, Manx name Gobbag vooar (big mouth) is the second largest fish in the world and we, in the Isle of Man, are fortunate enough to have a large number of them coming through our coastal waters from May to September. They are named basking sharks because of their habit of 'basking' at the surface of the water. They feed by filtering out plankton from the water in a similar manner to whales. Despite their huge size they are completely harmless to man. Unlike bony fish that can produce millions of young in a year basking sharks are viviparous (live bearing) and therefore breed exceedingly slowly. They are, therefore, very vulnerable to over-exploitation.
Basking sharks often bask at the surface apparently doing nothing! This one is feeding.
If you have a picture of a basking shark just basking
we would be delighted to put it here!
Picture: Pauline Oliver.
Many scientific papers mourn the fact that little is known about these gentle giants. This isn't completely true as this website draws on 37 scientific reports about basking sharks and there are many more. Drs Matthews and Harrison carried out some remarkable dissections in 1947 and their scientific papers remain the classical works on basking shark anatomy [17,18]. Until recently there were large knowledge gaps about what basking sharks did in the winter but currently Dr Sims' team at Plymouth Marine laboratory [24-31] and researchers working in New Zealand [10] are well on the way to remedying this situation. Dr Colin Speedie
Next section (general basking shark biology).