Understanding this filter-feeder’s diet is especially important since food sources determine much of the whale shark’s movement and location.ĭuring the dozens of surface trips that team members made to the aggregation, called the “Afuera” aggregation, they used fine nets to collect food samples inside and immediately outside the school of feeding whale sharks. They have a very widespread distribution, occurring in all tropical and sub-tropical regions of the ocean around the world. While whale sharks may seem conspicuous as the heaviest and longest of all fishes, growing more than 40 feet long, there is still much that is unknown about them. “Our research revealed that in this case, the hundreds of whale sharks had gathered to feed on dense patches of fish eggs.” “Whale sharks are the largest species of fish in the world, yet they mostly feed on the smallest organisms in the ocean, such as zooplankton,” said Mike Maslanka, biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and head of the Department of Nutrition Sciences. However this new research, which involved both surface and aerial surveys, has revealed an enormous aggregation of whale sharks-the largest ever reported-with up to 420 individuals off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues, however, have determined that this is not necessarily the case, finding that whale sharks can be gregarious and amass in the hundreds to feed in coastal waters.Īggregations, or schools, of whale sharks have been witnessed in the past, ranging from several individual sharks to a few dozen. Whale sharks ( Rhincodon typus) are often thought to be solitary behemoths that live and feed in the open ocean. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, African Art.And, if the pace of research keeps up, it’s unlikely the BOSS will keep the corner office for very long. Superclusters and cosmic walls like the BOSS and Sloan are helping researchers model the physics of the big bang and map the shape of the universe. “There are clearly kinks and bends in this structure that don’t exist, for example, in the Sloan Great Wall.”īut it’s not really the size of the wall that counts. “I don’t entirely understand why they are connecting all of these features together to call them a single structure,” Allison Coil of the University of California in San Diego tells New Scientist. Not everyone is convinced that the BOSS is truly the biggest, though. It also dwarfs both the CfA2 Wall discovered in 1989 and the Laniakea supercluster-the neighborhood where our own Milky Way resides. Sky News explains that the BOSS is two thirds bigger than the previous record holder, the Sloan Great Wall, which was discovered in 2003. Lurking 4.5 to 6.5 billion lightyears away, the BOSS has an estimated mass 10,000 times greater than our own Milky Way and recently described the find in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "On the grandest scales, the universe resembles a cosmic web of matter surrounding empty voids – and these walls are the thickest threads," he writes. The BOSS is named after the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey-an international effort to map galaxies and quasars in the early universe-and is like cosmic webbing. This wall is made up of 830 separate galaxies that gravity has corralled into four superclusters, connected by massive filaments of hot gas, Joshua Sokol reports for New Scientist. This creates a twisting structure that resembles a cosmic honeycomb. There are definitely no words to describe their latest find, dubbed the BOSS Great Wall, which is a supercluster of galaxies over 1 billion light years across, making it the largest structure observed in the universe so far. One such problem is describing size-words like big, humongous and immense don’t come close to describing the objects astronomers are discovering in deep space. The English language has a few limitations.
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