Tara Reid was a guest on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week talk show this week, and wow, did she enlighten us with her discussion of whale sharks.
"So I look up ‘sharks’ on the Internet," the Sharknado star said.
"Today I was like, all right, I don’t want to, like, really sound stupid when I do this show today, like… so I learned a little education on sharks."
"I see ‘whale sharks,’ so I’m like, that must mean that a whale and a shark have sex. And then I think, ‘Well, how do a whale and a shark have sex?’"
She was asked if there was a video online.
"No, there is a thing called whale sharks, and then I realized whales are mammals and sharks are animals, so they have nothing to do with each other."
"So basically the dolphins have sex with each other, but the sharks don’t, so I thought, ‘How is it such a thing?’" Reid, 37, continued over audience snickers.
"But the difference is, there is a whale shark, which is the biggest shark in the ocean – he’s also scary – and then you have the great white, who’s also scary.
"There are over 400 kinds of sharks," she concluded, baffling everyone, "but the whale shark is kind of interesting because he’s not so mean."
BOOM. Tara Reid, everybody! Dropping KNOWLEDGE on you!
A whale shark, of course, is not a whale-shark hybrid, but a shark named for its huge size. At 40 feet long, it’s about the size of a yellow school bus.
Not quite Megalodon size, but close.
The gentle giants are found predominantly in warm tropical waters, migrating each spring to the continental shelf of the central west coast of Australia.
Reid made Shark Week 2013 producers proud on one point, though. They are docile, or "not so mean." Whale sharks primarily ingest tiny plankton and plants.
The only burning question left for Tara: How do a shark and a tornado have sex?! Hopefully that’s a part of the Sharknado sequel, because we’re curious.