Carl Sbarounis was flying his plane over the ocean, scouting for fish as a commercial fisherman, when a friend called him with news of a rare sighting: A giant whale shark cruising through the blue Pacific waters.
It took him roughly 15 minutes to fly over, and he took out his camera, which he’s used to document other odd species he has encountered during his 40-plus years as a fish spotter for commercial fisheries.
“They do come through when the water is warm — mostly during El Niño,” he said of whale sharks, which he last saw about three years ago. “When the weather is nice, I see unusual stuff.”
Sbarounis estimated the whale shark that he photographed Wednesday, thanks to his friend Ryder DeVoe, was between 14 and 16 feet long. He said it was about 30 miles out, somewhere between Malibu and Santa Barbara Island.
That day, he also saw groups of uniquely colored manta rays — some were a tan brown, and others were gray with a black stripe, called spinetail devil rays.
It’s not the first rare sighting this summer. In August, a hammerhead shark was spotted off the Malibu pier, just below the surface of the water. The shark made a few circles, leaving fishermen on the pier stunned.
The tropical visitors are likely making their way to Southern California because of this year’s strong El Niño, as well as a regional marine heatwave over the last year or so, which are warming up the waters this summer, said Brendan Talwar, a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
“If you see it, that’s just a really unique and kind of exceptional sighting,” he said of the whale shark.
The whale shark is famous for being the largest fish on earth, Talwar said, but they have very small teeth and feed on plankton.
“We wouldn’t expect these animals to stick around through the late winter, for example. They’re going to move further back south as water gets colder,” Talwar said.
Sbarounis said he goes fishing about 120 days of the year, between May and November, from the Mexico border up to Point Conception, and off shore about 100 to 150 miles.
“That’s my playground,” he said.
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