(news.ninemsn.com)
Huge whale shark filmed in Queensland12:00 AEDT Wed Feb 15 2012
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By Ali Best, ninemsn
One of the fishermen pats the shark.
A huge whale shark has been filmed swimming up to a boat on a North Queensland reef, nudging the motor and letting a fisherman pat its back.
The enormous creature was spotted on Monday afternoon by three anglers who were fishing at Britomart Reef, 60km east of Cardwell.
Harry Kielenniva, who described the sighting as "unbelievable", estimated the shark to be 12m long. "It came up and hung around for a few minutes," Mr Kielenniva told the Townsville Bulletin.
"He even munched a bit on the boat, gumming it with his mouth."
But Brad Norman, a Murdoch University marine biologist and director of whale shark protection group Ecocean, thinks the shark may be smaller than originally thought.
"The fisherman said it was 12m and I don't want to shoot them down — it's very, very hard to estimate the size of animal that big — but I don't think it was that big," he told ninemsn.
"It's very hard to tell but in the report it says the boat was 7m long and if that's the case, [the shark] wouldn't have been that big."
Norman has been working with the threatened species for 17 years and admits it is still extremely hard to measure them, especially using the naked eye.
"I definitely don't want to knock these fellas … But often you have a guesstimation and sometimes guesstimations are accurate and sometimes they may not be.
"It's still a really big shark. And if it is a 12m long shark it would be one of the biggest sharks we've seen in Australia."
The number of whale shark sightings is increasing globally by about 1000 each year; a statistic Norman believes is due to a combination of advanced tehcnology and "citizen scientists" who are registering their encounters on a global database.
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