Divers from Bahia Diving on Curaçao had the amazing experience of spotting a whale shark on their dive on February 8th near Playa Kalki, on the west side of the island. Diver Peter Bot about the event: “We saw the shark at Playa Kalki around 10 o’clock in the morning, about 30 minutes in the dive. The divemaster and her two clients were swimming ahead of me. Then, in the blue, I saw something huge and white, which I initially thought was a big piece of plastic. But then the piece of plastic started to swim towards the surface. I used my metal shaker to signal the other divers and somehow this drew the attention of the whale shark, because she slowly started to swim towards me. She then shortly circled us and swam on.”
Just a day later, a local fisherman at Playa Piskado got the surprise of spotting a whale shark right from the Banco di Caribe Pier! Both sightings were filmed.
Playa Kalki, this morning…WOW! Nice whaleshark…..
Geplaatst door Bahia Diving op donderdag 8 februari 2018
A double sighting like this is very rare. In recent years there have been only a handful of total whale shark sightings in Curaçao. The whale shark is the largest fish species in the world and completely harmless because it only filter feeds on plankton, small crustaceans, and very small fishes. Regardless of their docile nature, whale sharks are highly mobile animals traveling distances of up to 2000 km within two months. Because of its high vulnerability to human threats, the global population has declined by over 50% over the last 75 years and the whale shark was recently uplisted on the IUCN Red List to the Endangered status.
Photo of Peter Bot filming the whale shark by P. Grimm
