🤯 Did You Know (click to read)
An adult African elephant typically weighs between 4 and 7 metric tons, overlapping with the upper range of basking shark mass.
Large basking sharks can exceed 5 metric tons in weight, placing them within the mass range of an adult African elephant. Despite this immense bulk, their diet consists almost entirely of microscopic plankton.
💥 Impact (click to read)
Matching a terrestrial giant in mass while feeding on organisms smaller than a fingernail creates a biological paradox. The shark must continuously filter enormous volumes of seawater to sustain a body comparable in weight to one of the largest land mammals.
This scale contrast highlights the extraordinary productivity of marine plankton ecosystems. Without dense microscopic life forming the ocean’s base food web, sustaining elephant-level biomass in a single fish would be impossible.
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