Up-close encounter with beautiful yet vulnerable whale sharks captured on video

A group of friends got up close and personal with some whale sharks — the ocean’s largest fish — while vacationing in the Philippines.

Lawrence Lerios, from Taguig City, shot a stunning video of his friends, who were staying at a Cebu resort, swimming around the slow-moving animals as they fed.

The footage shows the vacationers paddling out to the docile creatures, which weigh up to 40,000 pounds and grow up to 40 feet in length, and hopping off their boat to join the sharks.

These beautiful fish were characteristically unperturbed as Lerios swam around them without worry, collecting an impressive series of images.

But the whale shark’s colossal size and passive nature also lends itself to less pleasant encounters with humans.

Commercial fishers often deploy purse seine nets around whale sharks while fishing for tuna, which gather around large objects like these huge sharks near the ocean’s surface, according to Chris Fanning, a fishery policy analyst with NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region.

“A mini-ecosystem builds up underneath them. The fishermen were exploiting this. They were not purposefully targeting the whale sharks,” Fanning said in an interview with Yahoo News.

Sometimes fishers build floating structures called fish-aggregating devices, or FADs, to attract more tuna to a specific area. Other times, they just rely on whale sharks to do this, according to the federal agency.

This shortcut has resulted in the injury and death of enough whale sharks that an international commission adopted new restrictions specific to the eastern Pacific Ocean to protect them.

Last year, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) adopted a resolution, by consensus, that prohibits placing purse seine nets around whale sharks. It also mandates the immediate release of the sharks if they are accidentally captured.

In September, NOAA Fisheries — formally the National Marine Fisheries Service — issued regulations that prohibit American tuna-fishing vessels from using these nets on or near whale sharks.

Fanning, who helped draft the regulations, noted that U.S. fishing vessels do not engage in this practice but want to support IATTC’s resolution. He said this could help in “preserving a key component to the total open ocean ecosystem.”

The World Wildlife Fund classifies the whale shark as a vulnerable species. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species notes that their population is decreasing.

Lerios was not immediately available for comment.