Back in 2005, UPS the international shipping company received a very strange request. They were asked to priority overnight ship a group of whale sharks, and they even agreed to do it for free!
How did this happen?!
Bernard Marcus an eccentric billionaire and co-founder of the Home Depot, wanted to see some sharks at the Georgia aquarium in Atlanta. To make this happen he donated $250 million of his own money towards the opening of the aquarium!
The Georgia aquarium was set to become the largest aquarium in the world, and as the centerpiece of the entire facility, they had also built the world's largest tank to house their stars the whale sharks! This would make them the only aquarium outside of Asia to feature them, but it wasn't that simple to get them there.
There were a few problems the aquarium had to overcome first. Whale sharks are really big, secondly they had to come all the way from Taiwan, and most importantly they were living beings that you can't just put in a box!
The UPS company had earlier reached out to the aquarium and offered to ship anything for free, to help them get started. The aquarium took took this as literally anything, and so they asked UPS to help them ship live sharks from one side of the planet to the other!
Whale sharks are actually just a species of shark. The reason they get the name whale shark is because they're about as big as a whale. Luckily for UPS the whale sharks they were asked to ship were still kids, but they were still about 5 meters long and weighed 900 kilos each! Shipping a live animal is hard enough, but the whale sharks had to be in water of course, and the water itself is extremely heavy too! On top of that this would the very first time that someone had flown with whale sharks, so UPS had to figure everything out on their own.
The aquarium had purchased the sharks out of Taiwan's annual fishing kill quota, so if they hadn't done that the sharks would have ended up on someones plate!
Before the flight the sharks were being held in an ocean pen on the coast, near a small regional airport in the south of Taiwan. When UPS came to check everything, they realized that the runway of the airport couldn't support the weight of a Boeing 747 loaded with the sharks.
So this is what they did instead, they lifted the sharks out of the ocean with a crane and a sling, and then put them into customized shipping containers that were outfitted with life support systems. Then they were loaded onto a Lockheed C-130 military cargo plane and flown to the capital Taipei.
At Taipei the sharks were unloaded and then carefully loaded onto a 747 to distribute the weight, and the pilots were instructed to slowly take off and land so they wouldn't distress their special passengers too much.
But UPS had to be quick and couldn't afford any delays, as the sharks were constantly pooping and peeing inside of their tanks, and it's not like you can replace all the water in mid flight. Even a short delay could result in the deaths of one or both whale sharks!
The journey was going to be 17 hours long, so UPS brought on an entire team of veterinarians, carpenters, and marine biologists to make sure that the trip went smoothly.
The 747 took off from Taipei and had to make a stop in Anchorage for a fish and wildlife inspection. Here they would get a crew change and then continue on to Atlanta, where upon landing they were loaded onto trucks and driven to their new home at the aquarium.
UPS had achieved something that had never been done before in history! It took six weeks of planning and the total shipping cost was $1.4 million!
Not bad for the aquarium since all of this was done for free! But at least UPS got some free publicity out of it.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this story!