I was twelve. My father had taken us to the Maldives and there was a dive instructor who offered to take children on a guided snorkel in the lagoon. I had been in the water before, we went to the coast in summer and I could swim properly and I was not afraid of the open water the way some children are. But I had not been in the water the way I was in it that morning, twenty metres from the beach with the instructor pointing at the shape that was coming toward us from the direction of the open ocean.
The whale shark is the largest fish on Earth. It reaches twelve metres and it feeds on the plankton that the ocean surface produces, filtering the water through the gill rakers that line its cavernous mouth, moving slowly through the shallow areas where the plankton concentrates. It is not a whale.
It is not dangerous. It is the animal that the ocean produces at the scale that makes every other animal that the snorkeller normally encounters feel appropriately sized, and the first time you see one coming toward you through the water the specific reaction is not fear, it is the specific recalibration of the scale of the living world that the animal’s size delivers to the body before the mind has had time to process the information.
The whale shark passed three metres to my right. It was six or seven metres long. It took approximately forty-five seconds to pass from my field of vision ahead of me to the point where it disappeared behind me. I watched it the whole time. The instructor was pointing at it but I was not looking at the instructor. I was looking at the animal. I did not come up for forty-five seconds. I did not need to. I forgot that breathing was something I normally did more frequently than this.
What Happened After
The whale shark that the Naora members encounter on the Coral Triangle legs or the Maldives chapter or the specific sites on the route where the species appears is not the whale shark I saw when I was twelve. But the experience of encountering it for the first time is the same experience.
I watch it happen from three metres away, the same distance the animal was from me in the Maldives. The member who comes up from the water with the specific expression of the person whose scale of the living world has just been recalibrated is the member I was at twelve, in the same water, with the same animal.
I have been in the water with whale sharks dozens of times since the Maldives. I have never once not looked at them for the full duration of the encounter. I do not think I will.
