Basking Shark
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40 free Basking Shark trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The basking shark is one of the biggest fish in the sea, and it swims with its mouth wide open eating almost nothing you could see without a microscope. It looks alarming and is entirely harmless. For centuries people around the North Atlantic hunted it, feared it, mistook it for a monster and knew next to nothing about how it lives. This quiz gathers the fun facts about basking sharks that people go looking for: how such a huge animal feeds, where it goes in winter, what makes its body so odd, and what scientists have only recently learned by tagging and filming it. There are questions on the old shark fisheries of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, on the carcasses that fooled naturalists, and on the writers and film-makers who put the animal on the page and screen. It suits divers, wildlife watchers, students and anyone who has spotted that tall dark shape from a headland and wondered what was underneath. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A 2018 study found that the slow, plankton-eating basking shark can leap from the sea as fast as which predator?
Great white
Great white breaches are no faster: a tagged basking shark shot up from 28 metres with ten beats of its tail and left the sea at about 18 kilometres an hour. One scientist likened it to finding that cows are as fast as wolves.
Q 02Reflecting its slow, passive lifestyle, the basking shark has the smallest what, weight for weight, of any shark?
Brain
Brain power matters little to a fish that feeds by cruising open-mouthed through clouds of plankton, with no prey to stalk, chase or outwit.
Q 03A rotting basking shark hauled up by a Japanese trawler off New Zealand in 1977 was first hailed as which reptile?
Plesiosaur
Plesiosaur fever swept Japan after the crew sketched the carcass and dumped it overboard. A decaying basking shark sheds its lower jaw early, leaving a small skull on what looks like a long neck.
Q 04Which organ runs the length of a basking shark's body cavity, can reach a quarter of its weight and keeps it buoyant?
Its liver
Its liver is packed with oil lighter than seawater, so the organ acts as a built-in float and doubles as a long-term energy store.
Q 05In the 1950s Canada's fisheries department fitted a patrol boat with what to kill basking sharks off British Columbia?
A sharpened bow blade
A sharpened bow blade let the Comox Post slice through sharks that had been tangling in salmon nets, and it logged 413 kills in 14 years. The steel knife now sits in a museum in Port Alberni.
Q 06Unlike 99.9% of fish, basking sharks were found in 2023 to keep their core swimming muscles at what temperature?
Warmer than the water
Warmer than the water is how tuna and other fast hunters run their muscles, so finding the trait in a plankton grazer stunned researchers. One compared it to discovering that cows have wings.
Q 07Lines of basking sharks cruising nose to tail at the surface are thought to explain many old sightings of what?
Sea serpents
Sea serpents were a common verdict when sailors watched basking sharks swimming in single file, and washed-up carcasses with oddly small skulls kept the legend alive.
Q 08Among all the fish alive today, where does the plankton-eating basking shark rank by size?
Second largest
Second largest, behind only the whale shark: a typical adult basking shark is about 7.9 metres long and weighs more than 4.5 tonnes.
Q 09So little is known about basking shark births that science has only ever recorded a single what?
Pregnant female
Pregnant female basking sharks are almost never met: the only one on record was carrying six young. Pups are thought to be born already 1.5 to 2 metres long.
Q 10A basking shark eats only plankton, yet its jaws hold hundreds of teeth; what are they like?
Small and hooked
Small and hooked, each one is just 5 to 6 millimetres long, and a single row can hold about a hundred of them.
Q 11Only three sharks live on plankton: the basking shark, the whale shark and which rarely seen fish found in 1976?
Megamouth
Megamouth sharks were unknown until one tangled in a US Navy ship's sea anchor off Hawaii. It is the smallest of the three plankton eaters, at around 4 to 5.5 metres long.
Q 12Which dark, bristle-like structures in a basking shark's throat strain plankton from the water flowing through?
Gill rakers
Gill rakers do for this fish what baleen does for a filter-feeding whale. The water escapes through slits that almost ring the shark's head, while the food stays behind.
Q 13Basking sharks seek out dense patches of which tiny crustaceans, their favourite kind of zooplankton?
Copepods
Q 21A basking shark tagged off Cape Cod surprised scientists by spending a month near the mouth of which river?
Amazon
Amazon waters were the last place anyone expected to find the species. The tagged fish crossed the equator out of sight, staying 200 to 1,000 metres down for weeks on end.
Q 22Tagged basking sharks that summer off western Scotland have wintered as far south as which archipelago?
The Canaries
The Canaries were only half the journey: the same individual sharks came back to the waters around Coll and Tiree in consecutive summers.
Q 23The longest basking shark on record, 12.27 metres, was trapped in a herring net in 1851 off which part of Canada?
Bay of Fundy
Copepods of the genus Calanus are the prize: water sampled beside feeding basking sharks held far more of them, and bigger ones, than water a short distance away.
Q 14A basking shark is a ram feeder, meaning it can only push water through its mouth by doing what?
Moving forwards
Moving forwards is its only option: a whale shark can also suck or pump water in, but a basking shark that stops travelling stops eating.
Q 15Before satellite tags proved them active all year, basking sharks were thought to spend winter doing what in deep water?
Hibernating
Hibernating seemed a fair guess because the sharks vanish from the surface each autumn. Tags showed they simply go deep, sometimes 900 metres down, and keep on feeding.
Q 16Groups of basking sharks that gather in summer and swim in slow, tight circles are thought to be doing what?
Courting
Courting is the leading explanation for the rings, which form where plankton is thickest. Basking sharks live mostly alone or in single-sex shoals, so such gatherings may be how mates meet.
Q 17A basking shark that swam 9,589 km across the Atlantic to Newfoundland had been tagged in 2007 off which island?
Isle of Man
Isle of Man waters are a summer hotspot, and this journey was the first proof that European and American basking sharks can mix. On the way the shark dived to 1,264 metres.
Q 18Islanders on Atlantic coasts once harpooned basking sharks mainly for oil that was burned in what?
Lamps
Lamps were lit with basking shark oil long before electricity, and a single fish could yield 200 to 400 gallons of it. The oil was also used to lubricate machinery.
Q 19Which author of the otter memoir Ring of Bright Water first tried his luck harpooning basking sharks from Soay?
Gavin Maxwell
Gavin Maxwell bought the island of Soay, off Skye, in the 1940s and built a shark oil factory there. The business failed within three years, and he told the story in Harpoon at a Venture.
Q 20Which marine mammals have been seen feeding on basking sharks off both California and New Zealand?
Orcas
Orcas are among the very few predators a basking shark has. The scars many of the sharks carry may come from far smaller attackers, such as cookiecutter sharks.
Bay of Fundy fishermen landed a giant whose weight was later put at 16 tonnes. A later growth study suggested that basking sharks much over 10 metres are unlikely.
Q 24Basking shark oil is rich in which compound, now used in skin creams and some vaccine adjuvants?
Squalene
Squalene takes its name from Squalus, a genus of sharks, because shark oil is where a Japanese chemist first found it in 1906. Olive oil contains it too.
Q 25After the oil trade faded, basking sharks were still hunted because their fins fetched high prices for making what?
Soup
Soup thickened with shark fin is a prestige dish in East Asia, and the basking shark's fins are so big that a fresh pair has fetched up to $1,000 at market.
Q 26Which 1934 film about Atlantic islanders staged a basking shark hunt its cast had to be taught how to carry out?
Man of Aran
Man of Aran gives much of its second half to the hunt, though director Robert Flaherty admitted the sequence was there for the box office. A stuffed basking shark went on show in London for the premiere.
Q 27Keem Bay, once home to a basking shark fishery, lies on which part of County Mayo seen in The Banshees of Inisherin?
Achill
Achill was once known for its shark fishing, a business run industrially by the 1950s with the oil as the prize. Keem is now a Blue Flag beach.
Q 28Johan Ernst Gunnerus, who gave the basking shark its first scientific description in 1765, held which post in Norway?
Bishop
Bishop of Nidaros, based in Trondheim, Gunnerus gathered specimens on his travels around Norway and named the shark Squalus maximus. The plant genus Gunnera honours him.
Q 29Which nickname does the basking shark share with Mola mola, a heavy bony fish that also lolls at the surface?
Sunfish
Sunfish, like the official name, comes from the shark's habit of lying at the surface as if sunning itself. Another old name for it is the bone shark.
Q 30Before birth, basking shark embryos are thought to use their teeth to feed on what inside the mother?
Unfertilised eggs
Unfertilised eggs keep arriving from the mother as food, a habit called oophagy. It may explain why a plankton eater bothers to grow teeth at all.