This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
The day began as usual for Ganeshbhai Devjibhai Varidum. The 54-year-old fisherman was on a trawler off the coast of the western Indian state of Gujarat, and the Arabian Sea was turbid, as it always is in this region.
But as he and his crew drew up their enormous net, he suddenly spotted something. “I saw some black spots near the surface, and then a massive shadow.”
They had mistakenly caught a whale shark, the largest fish in the world and one that fisherfolk in Gujarat are no strangers to. Up to 40 feet in length and an inveterate migrator, the whale shark is as long as a city bus, and probably clocks as many, if not more miles. Caught as bycatch in Varidum’s trawling net, the fish thrashed about, getting increasingly entangled.
Twenty-five years ago, the giant animal would have been killed, towed to the shore, and its extensive oil reserves used to waterproof fishing boats. But Varidum did something extraordinary: He cut the net, which would have cost him upwards of $2,500, to free the shark. “Just imagine, this is the largest fish in the world and it comes to our shore […] that’s something, right?” he says. “Watching it go free gave me peace of mind.”
Found in tropical waters in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, whale sharks might be dauntingly large but they are known as the sea’s gentle giants. They feed on plankton and tiny fish on the water’s surface simply by opening their huge mouths, swallowing water and passively filtering small creatures with their mesh-like gills.
Their interactions with humans are peaceful and curious, but they face a number of manmade threats the world over, including finning, bycatch, vessel strikes and climate change. In India, whale sharks migrate, feed and reproduce along both its eastern and western coasts. And until the late 1990s, the shores of Gujarat were ground zero for whale shark hunting. The fish did not even have a name in the local language (fishers simply called them “badi macchli,” or big fish) but their fins, oil and even meat were lucrative commodities.
In 2000, Shores of Silence, a documentary by Indian filmmaker Mike Pandey, highlighted this carnage. The film, and advocacy by the Indian delegation at the 2002 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Santiago, led to a greater control over trade in whale shark products. Vivek Menon, co-founder of Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), was in the delegation and instrumental in this advocacy.
The post The Spiritual Movement Saving a Gentle Giant appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
