🤯 Did You Know (click to read)
Basking sharks can live for an estimated 50 years or more, making them both massive and long-lived ocean filter feeders.
The basking shark is the second-largest fish on Earth, reaching lengths of up to 12 meters, longer than a standard London double-decker bus. Despite its enormous size and cavernous mouth that can stretch over a meter wide, it feeds almost exclusively on microscopic plankton by filtering seawater through specialized gill rakers.
💥 Impact (click to read)
At full size, a basking shark can weigh over 5 metric tons, yet it survives on organisms invisible to the naked eye. To sustain itself, it filters thousands of tons of seawater each hour, swimming slowly near the surface with its mouth agape, a feeding strategy that looks predatory but is entirely passive.
This extreme mismatch between body mass and food size challenges intuitive assumptions about marine predators. As one of the largest vertebrates in the ocean, the basking shark demonstrates how plankton form the energetic foundation of entire ocean ecosystems, supporting giants that rival the size of small whales.
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