Iola Elementary School is under a shark advisory.
A bus in front of the school was turned into a shark last week to recognize the return of Shark Week for SAFE BASE students.
That’s because some sharks can grow the length of a bus — or maybe even longer.
SAFE BASE, the after-school program for USD 257, has celebrated Shark Week for about seven years. It’s an opportunity to teach students about the ocean, history, Kansas topography and more, SAFE BASE director Angela Henry explained.
So what can students learn from seeing a school bus transformed into a shark?
Well, it’s a whale shark. They’re the largest fish in the world. They typically grow to 39 feet in length and weigh about 15 tons, but there are reports of whale sharks that reached 59 feet. Their lifespan is estimated between 60 and 100 years.
Whale sharks are known as the gentle giants of the sea. They’re slow moving filter feeders, which means they feast on plankton, krill and small fish — not humans. Their mouth is about 5-feet wide, but their throat is the size of a quarter.
Though whale sharks are not a threat to humans, they are considered endangered. In many countries, they are killed for their large fins, which are used to make an illegal delicacy called “fin soup.”
The whale shark bus in front of IES will do more than just attract the attention of passers-by.
Students will enter the inside of the whale shark near the front of its filtering gills (the bus doors). They’ll crawl through a barrel to represent the shark’s throat before entering into the body of the shark (bus) to discover and discuss its internal organs.
On Thursday, the shark will turn back into a bus.
ALSO during Shark Week, students will learn about:
Single-use plastic polluting the ocean;
How NASA is using astronomical pattern-matching algorithm software to identify individual whale sharks;
How whale sharks’ spots, dots and stripes are much like the human fingerprint;
How our fingerprints are unique to each of us; what whale sharks eat and how filter feeding works;
