A Florida boater who caught a ride with a whale shark by grabbing onto the animal's back fin earlier this month says the creature was not harmed, but some experts have disagreed.
Charter boat captain James Bostwick posted a video on his Facebook page showing him swimming from his boat and latching on to a large whale shark, the largest fish in the word, which pulls him along through the water.
"The fish was as big as the boat, 30 feet long," he said. "The whale shark basically came right to us, yeah, it was as curious about us as we were about it."
Bostwick's ride on top of the whale shark was not an illegal act, experts said, although they say it could injure the animal.
"They can't hurt you, but we can hurt them with too much contact," said Bob Hueter, the director at the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory.
Whale sharks have protected status, he said, meaning they can't be caught, harassed or molested. It's all right to swim alongside them around 6 feet away, he said, but he recommends not touching the animals, even though it's not against the law to do so.
"The problem with touching them is they have a mucous layer on the skin that is disturbed when touched, (so) too much it can compromise the health of the animal in the long run," he said.
Bostwick said he believed the whale shark was not bothered by being ridden and in fact swam with three other people in the water, spending around 20 minutes with the group.
On his Facebook page he said it was his first sighting of a whale shark ever, but that a ride on one has always been on his bucket list.
He wasn't at all scared, he said.
"Never, never, that's one of the most docile animals I've ever come across," he said.
Whale sharks are low-moving filter feeders and dine on plankton and are not a threat to humans.
They can grow as large as 40 feet long and weigh more than 20 tons.
Whale sharks, which can live as long as 70 years, have been swimming in the world's warm and tropical oceans for the last 60 million years.
They are not whales, which are mammals; they are fish, the name simply bestowed because of the animals' great size, as large as some whale species.
