Adapted from an article on www.news.bbc.co.uk                           Wednesday 18th January 2006

Whale sharks spotted off the coast of Australia are getting smaller, researchers of Ningaloo Marine Park there have said. In a decade the average size has shrunk from seven metres to five metres.

Whale sharks, the world's largest fish, are caught for food in some east Asian countries and Australian researchers suspect this is causing a decline.

Whale sharks are filter feeders, eating small marine organisms such as krill. They can live for up to 150 years, attaining lengths of up to 20m, and are believed to reach sexual maturity around the age of 30.

"Whale sharks, like many other shark species, are highly vulnerable to over-exploitation due to their long life span and low reproductive rate," commented Callum Roberts of York University in the UK. " ... So whale sharks are at risk, and the decline in size might be due to capture of large sharks."

There are also indications that the number of sharks visiting Australian waters may be decreasing, which would be additional evidence for a decline prompted by over-fishing.

Either the meat is eaten, or the giant fins used as advertising boards for restaurants serving shark fin soup; livers are used for oil, and cartilage in traditional Chinese medicine.

"Many of the people doing the fishing are just local villagers with no other option," said Mark Meekan of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. "If we know who they are, we can give them another option, and that option is very lucrative: the ecotourism industry in Ningaloo (where the size decrease has been noted) generates £28m a year, enough to support an entire town."

[ Definition: ecotourism tries to be more friendly to the local environment and more helpful to the local people in the areas visited by the tourists. ]

Postscript:

Researchers have found one of the smallest known fish on record in the peat swamps of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Individuals of the Paedocypris genus can be just 7.9mm long at maturity, scientists write in a journal published by the UK's Royal Society. The fish have to survive in pools of acid water in a tropical forest swamp.

But they warn long-term prospects for the fish are poor, because of rapid destruction of Indonesian peat swamps.

[ information obtained from www.news.bbc.co.uk Wednesday 25 January 2006 ]

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