Rare video shows world's largest species of fish slurping up anchovies in Hawaii

An enormous whale shark can be seen feeding on a bustling school of anchovies off the coast of Hawaii in new, rare video, which researchers captured while conducting fieldwork around the island of Oahu earlier this month.

The video gives an intimate look at a 30-foot whale shark — about the same length as two cars parked bumper to bumper — slowly approaching and poking its head into the dense pack of fish swimming near the surface of the water about a mile off Kaneohe Bay, on the northeastern side of Oahu. 

Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa spotted the whale shark on Nov. 2 after initially seeing seabirds flying over what they assumed was a "bait ball," a spherical swarm of small fish that forms when a predator is lurking below, the university announced in a news release issued alongside the video. Mark Royer, a shark researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology's shark research lab, filmed the whale shark feeding underwater. He said in a video put together by the University of Hawaii that encountering the shark was "surprising."