Whale Shark Trivia
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50 free Whale Shark trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This whale shark trivia quiz covers the largest fish alive: how long it really gets and why the record is so hard to pin down, how its 20 filter pads strain 6,000 litres of water an hour, why its blue-tuned rhodopsin lets it see at both the surface and 2,000 m down, the 300-pup pregnant female of 1996, and the 80-130 year lifespan measured against Cold War bomb-test carbon. It also covers whale sharks and people: Andrew Smith's 1828 Table Bay specimen, the giant tales of Wright and Hugh M. Smith, the 400-shark gathering off Yucatan, 'Rio Lady' and her 7,772 km trip, the Philippine 100-peso note, the names marokintana and jinbei-zame, Okinawa Churaumi's 26-year resident, Georgia Aquarium's imports and the fishing bans that followed. Every question was verified against a primary reference (the Wikipedia article on the whale shark) and carries a citation. Play it with our great white, hammerhead and ocean quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What distinction does the whale shark hold?
Largest living fish
Largest living fish: only some whales are bigger, yet it lives on plankton, fish eggs and small schooling fish that it strains from the water.
Q 02Which animals have been filmed hunting whale sharks in the Gulf of California, flipping them onto their backs?
Orcas
Orcas, a male nicknamed Moctezuma among them at three of the four recorded hunts, ram young whale sharks over and bite at the belly until they bleed out.
Q 03About how long was the largest whale shark ever reliably measured?
About 19 metres
About 19 metres: a shark caught by India's Arabian Sea fishery came to 18.8 m. Sharks of 20 m have been claimed, but a 2015 review of ocean giants judged the 18.8 m figure the most reliable.
Q 04Despite its name, what kind of animal is the whale shark?
A cartilaginous fish
A cartilaginous fish: like every shark it has a skeleton of cartilage, not bone, and it breathes through gills, so unlike a whale it never has to come up for air.
Q 05The first whale shark known to science was harpooned in 1828 off which African port?
Cape Town
Cape Town: the shark was harpooned in Table Bay, and Andrew Smith, a British army surgeon who ran the town's new museum, wrote the first scientific description of the species.
Q 06How does a whale shark take in food when it hangs still and upright below the surface?
By sucking water in
By sucking water in: it snaps its mouth open to gulp, then shuts it to force the water out through its gills, so it can feed on a dense patch of food without swimming at all.
Q 07Where is the whale shark's mouth positioned, unlike most sharks?
At the front of the head
At the front of the head, where a mouth up to 1.5 metres across works like a scoop: the shark cruises along with it wide open.
Q 08What do whale sharks use their roughly 300 rows of teeth for?
No known purpose
No known purpose, researchers think: the teeth are tiny, and the shark feeds by straining small prey out of the water at its gills.
Q 09Which fish hitch rides on whale sharks, clinging on with a sucker on top of their heads?
Remoras
Remoras hold on with a disc that is really a reshaped dorsal fin, saving the effort of swimming while they pick parasites and scraps off their host.
Q 10What armour did a 2020 study find covering the whale shark's eyeballs?
Tiny tooth-like scales
Tiny tooth-like scales, a form of the dermal denticles that cover a shark's skin, stud each eyeball. With no eyelids to shut, the shark can also pull its eyes about halfway back into their sockets.
Q 11Two mutations tune the whale shark's light-sensing eye pigment to which colour, the one that dominates the deep sea?
Blue
Blue light is what filters down to the depths. One of the two mutations causes night blindness in people, whose body heat makes the altered pigment fall apart; in the shark's eye it keeps working.
Q 12Which sex of whale shark grows larger, according to a 2020 Western Australian study?
Females
Females: the study put them near 14.5 m on average against 8 to 9 m for males, which grow faster when young but level off much sooner.
Q 13Why do whale sharks linger at the surface after deep dives?
Warming back up
Warming back up, researchers think: the sharks are rarely found in water below 21 °C, and tags show that the colder the dive, the longer they stay on top afterwards.
Q 21How do female whale sharks seem to keep producing pups long after a single mating?
By storing sperm
By storing sperm: DNA tests on embryos from one litter found a single father for them all, although they ranged from unhatched eggs to pups ready to be born.
Q 22A 38 cm whale shark found on a beach suggested the area is what?
Birthing ground
A birthing ground, WWF suggested in 2009: the pup, found with its tail tied to a rope, was no bigger than the unborn embryos taken from a pregnant shark years earlier, so it may have been born close by.
Q 23Unlike most whale shark gatherings, those at Darwin Island in the Galápagos are nearly all what?
Adult females
Q 14A tagged whale shark, a surface feeder, once dived about how deep?
1,900 metres
About 1,900 metres: the tag logged 1,928 m, well over a mile down, although sharks tracked in the open ocean spent about 95% of their time in the top 200 m.
Q 15Whale sharks from which waters are genetically distinct from all the rest?
Atlantic
The Atlantic holds about a quarter of the world's whale sharks, and because the two stocks are distinct the Red List scores them separately: down about 63% in the Indo-Pacific, over 30% in the Atlantic.
Q 16In 2009 over 400 whale sharks gathered off which coast, one of the largest gatherings ever?
The Yucatan, Mexico
The Yucatan, Mexico: one aerial survey counted 420 sharks packed into a patch of sea of about 18 square kilometres, all gorging on freshly spawned fish eggs.
Q 17Which Western Australian site hosts a famous seasonal whale shark aggregation?
Ningaloo
Ningaloo's whale sharks arrive from March to feed on plankton blooming along the reef, close enough to shore that a licensed swim-with-the-sharks industry has grown up around them.
Q 18A 2020 study dated whale sharks' growth bands using carbon-14 left in their backbones by what?
Cold War atomic bomb tests
Cold War atomic bomb tests spiked the carbon-14 in the sea, and the spike marks one band like a date stamp. It showed one band forms a year, not the two an earlier study assumed, so the sharks are twice as old.
Q 19Why are whale sharks so slow to recover from overfishing?
Decades to reach maturity
Decades to reach maturity: males are thought to be about 25 before they can breed, so a shark caught young has never bred at all.
Q 20A pregnant whale shark harpooned in 1995 was carrying roughly how many pups?
About 300
About 300 embryos, some still in egg cases and others already hatched, settled a long debate: the young hatch inside the mother and are born live.
Adult females made up 91.5% of the sharks identified there in 2011 to 2013. Their swollen bellies were long read as pregnancy, until ultrasound scans published in 2023 found no embryos at all.
Q 24A whale shark tagged in 2007 swam over 7,000 km in 150 days, crossing which line?
The Equator
The Equator: the tag surfaced just south of it, far out between Brazil and Africa, after at least 7,213 km. Researchers suspect the journey had to do with breeding.
Q 25Besides the whale shark, which two sharks are the only other filter feeders?
The basking and megamouth
The basking and megamouth sharks: the megamouth went unseen until one was hauled up off Hawaii in 1976, so unlike anything known that a whole new family had to be created for it.
Q 26Whale sharks are technically omnivores because they ingest and partly digest what?
Sargassum seaweed
Sargassum seaweed drifts at the surface where the sharks feed, and chemical tests of their tissues suggest they draw real nourishment from it, which makes the whale shark the world's largest omnivore.
Q 27What is a whale shark doing when it 'coughs'?
Clearing its filter pads
Clearing its filter pads, it is thought: food is sieved from the water by 20 pads at the back of the mouth, and a sharp backflush clears whatever has built up on them.
Q 28Whale sharks sieve huge volumes of seawater, and a 2021 study found which pollutant in their droppings?
Microplastics
Microplastics: a juvenile sieves an estimated 21 kg of plankton a day, and floating plastic gathers in the same surface waters where the sharks feed.
Q 29Its numbers halved, the whale shark entered which IUCN category in 2016?
Endangered
Endangered, one step up from Vulnerable: the sharks were still being fished in places and hauled up by boats chasing tuna, which often swim alongside them.
Q 30The whale shark is a carpet shark, which makes which of these sharks its close relative?
Nurse shark
Nurse sharks are carpet sharks too, a group of mostly bottom-dwelling hunters, which makes the ocean-roaming whale shark the odd one out in its own order.