Dancing with the whale sharks

This has got to be one of the strangest scuba dives of my life: 100 feet under water in the Gladden Split Marine Reserve, arms locked with four complete strangers in a bizarre, bubble-blowing, ring-around-the-rosy dance. And -- guess what? -- we are doing this solely for the purpose of attracting sharks.

To non-divers, this must sound like a drug-induced mass trance. But nobody's taking anything stronger than orange soda; alcohol and drugs are strictly forbidden on our dive boat. We are here -- nearly 30 miles offshore of southern Belize -- hoping to interact with whale sharks.

Gladden Split, a point where the north-south-running coral reef turns east-west, is one of the few places where the world's largest fish can be predicted to show up. From March through June, from a few days before the full moon to a few days afterward, the huge, brown sharks with white spots are drawn in by the spawning of cubera, mutton and dog snapper. The whale sharks are not interested in eating the fish; they are filter-feeders that devour the clouds of eggs and sperm that sometimes are so dense as to reduce visibility to zero...[MiamiHerald.com]