How many liters of seawater can a 6-meter whale shark filter hourly?
Answer
600,000 liters
The necessity of filtering an immense volume of water to obtain adequate nutrition accounts for the giant size of the whale shark's mouth apparatus. Specifically, an individual whale shark measuring approximately 6 meters in length possesses the capacity to filter upwards of 600,000 liters of seawater over the span of a single hour. To contextualize this massive rate of processing, this volume is equivalent to roughly 600,000 standard milk bottles being processed within that sixty-minute timeframe. This extraordinary filtering capacity underscores the energetic demands of maintaining their massive size and the requirement to locate areas where prey density is high enough to make such high-volume processing worthwhile.
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