Cai Chengzhu and his fellow fishermen were out to catch some fish but they didn’t expect a haul quite this big when they accidentally landed a two-ton whale shark on Friday.
The shark had got caught in the fishermen’s nets while likely trying to eat the much smaller fish that were already captured by the Chinese boat.
The fisherman, Cai Chengzhu, said that as he and his colleagues began to pull their net out from the water, they spotted a huge hole formed by the “giant fish”.
“It’s believed that the giant creature broke the net and got inside to eat the fish we caught,” he said.
Cai then tried to transport the shark by tractor with the intention to sell it but the whale shark is considered a nationally protected species of which it is illegal to sell any parts of the animal.
The amazing thing about this whale shark is that it’s not even that big (by whale shark standards). At 4.5 meters (roughly 14 feet and 7 inches) and two tons, the whale shark that Cai caught is undoubtedly impressive in size but it’s nowhere near record-breaking. The largest whale shark ever discovered by man was 12.65 meters in length (about 41 feet and 6 inches) and weighed 21.5 tons.
But hey, at least Cai and his crew have a good fishing story to tell for the rest of their lives. It’s not every day that a dude gets to pull a whale shark by tractor.
