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Whale shark feeding near the surface with its mouth open, surrounded by small fish

Chondrichthyes · Orectolobiformes

Whale Shark

Rhincodon typus

Largest living fish, exceeding 12 meters, filter-feeding through gill rakers modified into a fine porous mesh while cruising just beneath the sea surface.

Realm
Marine
Conservation status
ENEndangered
Data provenance

This range is an occurrence-derived learning extent, not an official assessment range map. See the methodology page for the complete pipeline. GBIF.org occurrence density (GBIF Maps API v2) · 1° global raster; derived from GBIF per-cell occurrence density, vagrant-trimmed by a cumulative record-count threshold, morphologically closed, small-and-distant components pruned, clipped to a Natural Earth 1:110m realm mask.

Method and version
Evidence snapshot

A sample of openly-licensed occurrence records retained after quality filtering. 1456 licence-filtered records across 75 1° cells, retrieved 2026-08-24.

Inspect on GBIF
Retained datasets (8)