---
title: Whale sharks (Rhincodontidae)
scientific_name: Rhincodontidae
common_name: Whale sharks
rank: Family
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:28:58.634Z
tags: Whale sharks, Rhincodontidae, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/sharks/whale-sharks
---

# Whale sharks (*Rhincodontidae*)

## Quick facts

- **Rank:** Family
- **Scientific name:** Rhincodontidae
- **Body shape:** Torpedo - Streamlined and muscular, built for open-water speed - jacks, tunas, barracudas.
- **Species listed here:** 1

## How to recognise this group

- extremely large size, often over 5 meters
- broad, flattened head
- very large, wide, terminal mouth
- dark body with distinctive pale spots and stripes
- slow, steady swimming near the surface

Every whale shark that has been photographed properly has a file, a history, and usually a name.

The spots behind the gills are set before birth and never change, and the pattern on one flank is as individual as a fingerprint. Since the early 2000s that has been used to build a global register, and the matching is done with software borrowed from astronomy: an algorithm written to line up star fields between telescope images turned out to work just as well on a field of spots on a shark. Anyone can feed it a photograph. Aim at the flank just behind the gills and above the pectoral fin, the left side by convention, upload the frame, and the library will tell you whether that individual has been seen before and where. Sharks logged this way have been re-photographed thousands of kilometers from the first encounter, and that library is the reason anyone knows anything about where these animals go.

The other thing worth knowing is how it eats. It is a suction filter feeder rather than a strainer. Water crosses the filter pads at an angle instead of being forced through them, so food is swept back toward the throat and the mesh does not clog, and when it does clog the shark coughs, a visible backwash that blows the pads clean. It can also hang vertically in the water column and gulp at a dense patch of eggs or krill instead of swimming through it. The thousands of tiny teeth in its mouth do nothing at all.

The family holds a single species. In the Red Sea it is a seasonal visitor and not a resident, turning up most often from spring into early summer, and an encounter on the Egyptian coast is luck rather than itinerary; the one dependable gathering in this sea is on the Saudi side, near Al Lith. The species is listed as endangered.


## Species (1)

- [Whale Shark (Rhincodon typus)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/sharks/whale-sharks/whale-shark)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/fishes/sharks/whale-sharks)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*