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This week, collecting DNA from one of the world's biggest gatherings of whale sharks.

It's actually quite overwhelming because suddenly you're in the middle of this huge

group of whale sharks and you can just see fins in every direction.

And the story of Harvard Observatory's 19th century female computers.

Their data crunching duties soon morphed into discovery duties and they made very interesting discoveries

plus using electron microscopes to build things not just look at things this is the nature podcast

for november the 24th 2016 i'm kerry Smith. And I'm Adam Levy.

Whale sharks are sharks, not whales. But if you ever see one up close, you can easily understand how they got their name.

They can weigh up to 30 tonnes and can be almost 20 metres long, making them the largest fish in the world. But despite their huge size, studying them in the vast oceans is like

studying a needle in a haystack. A study published in one of Nature's newest journals, Nature,

Ecology and Evolution, decided to look at the haystack itself for signs of the

needles. It uses samples of seawater to study the genetic diversity of whale sharks. I called up the

study's first author, PhD student Eva Iling Sisco, to find out why it's important to collect genetic

information from these animals in the first place. The whale shark is endangered globally and we still know very little about it.

So what we actually hope is that understanding more about their genetics can help us both

understand the species better and based on this be better at conserving it.

...