Whale Shark at Georgia Aquarium/Wikimedia Commons
CHICAGO, Illinois — How do female whale sharks meet their perfect mates and go on to produce offspring? While little is known about the reproductive behavior of these ocean-roaming giants, a newly published analysis led by University of Illinois at Chicago biologist Jennifer Schmidt reveals new details about the mating habits of this elusive, difficult-to-study fish.
Schmidt, a UIC associate professor of biological sciences, determined paternity of 29 frozen embryos saved from a female whale shark caught off the coast of Taiwan in 1995. The embryos, studied in collaboration with Professor Shoou-Jeng Joung at the National Taiwan Ocean University, are extremely rare.
The pregnant shark carried a surprisingly large number of embryos — 304 — still in the uterus and representing a spectrum of age and development stages ranging from being still egg-encased to developed, near-term animals.
Schmidt and her colleagues spent several years developing DNA genetic markers to study whale sharks, initially for population genetics, but in this study the tool was used to determine paternity.
