The Whale Shark (Rhincodon Typus) is the largest shark in the ocean, growing to a maximum of 65 feet long and weighing over 10 tons, that’s more than three times the size of the great white shark. It also makes the whale shark the largest fish living today. Unlike the great white shark, the whale shark’s 3,000 teeth are tiny and they do not use them to tear apart mammals, in fact their teeth is of little use to the whale shark. So what does the whale shark eat to survive? Whale sharks don’t hunt their prey like other sharks, whale sharks are filter feeders, they consume food by engulfing their prey that enters their mouth. Like most filter feeders their diet consists of small organisms such as plankton, krill, shrimp, algae and larvae. The
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The whale shark contained a novel toll like receptor protein with sequence conservation to both the TLR4 and TLR13 proteins of mammals. Thee population expansion was found due to the microsatellites and mitochondrial DNA. Whale sharks are part of a single global metapopulation which was a hypothesis tested. The genome sequence of an organism is now perhaps the single most important gateway to understanding its biology. Despite the incomplete nature of the data, the sequence will be a resource that can accelerate scientific investigation of the whale shark and of elasmobranchs in general. In this research paper, microsatellite (406 samples) and mtDNA (573 samples) were both analyzed from as many as 9 locations. The locations included the Red Sea and the Gulf of California. Fragments of mtDNA sequences were read using Geneious 6 and aligned using the ClustalX method. The two database produced raw and a modified dataset where gaps and insertions found were replaced with a one mutation step. For microsatellites, the rarefaction method was used in the software HP-rare (Kalinowski 2005) to calculate the difference in the sample
The whale shark contained a novel toll like receptor protein with sequence conservation to both the TLR4 and TLR13 proteins of mammals. Thee population expansion was found due to the microsatellites and mitochondrial DNA. Whale sharks are part of a single global metapopulation which was a hypothesis tested. The genome sequence of an organism is now perhaps the single most important gateway to understanding its biology. Despite the incomplete nature of the data, the sequence will be a resource that can accelerate scientific investigation of the whale shark and of elasmobranchs in general. In this research paper, microsatellite (406 samples) and mtDNA (573 samples) were both analyzed from as many as 9 locations. The locations included the Red Sea and the Gulf of California. Fragments of mtDNA sequences were read using Geneious 6 and aligned using the ClustalX method. The two database produced raw and a modified dataset where gaps and insertions found were replaced with a one mutation step. For microsatellites, the rarefaction method was used in the software HP-rare (Kalinowski 2005) to calculate the difference in the sample