Scientists are using cloud computing and AI to track these mysterious, beautiful whale sharks

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jo Best.

Someone grabbed my wrist and pointed sharply below us: ‘Quick, look down!’ I swam to face the seabed and gasped through my snorkel. A shark stretching some 8m long, as long as a bus, had moved silently underneath us — and I hadn’t noticed it at all. The whale shark, a beautiful creature, a filter-feeder whose giant mouth gives it a benign look, is good at escaping detection.

It’s still not known how large the global population of whale sharks is, how they migrate across the oceans, and where they give birth, despite being the largest fish species alive today. For a few minutes off the coast of Ningaloo in Western Australia, I was able to swim with one such shark, before it disappeared off into the Indian Ocean, too deep and too fast for humans to follow…

All that remained of our encounter was a short video, taken by another snorkeller who’d been with me that day…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/scientists-are-using-cloud-computing-and-ai-to-track-these-mysterious-beautiful-whale-sharks/