Whale Sharks

Category: Education | Date: Jul 18 2008 | By: whalesharks

Greetings from Holbox island (pronounced “Holbosh”), venue of the 2nd International Whale Shark Conference. It is so exciting to be here and now the conference is well underway. We started on Tuesday with an opening address. Paco Remolina from CONANP (the National Protected Areas body) has been in charge of organising the conference and here he is welcoming us.

Note the very cool logo for the conference - can you see that it is the inside of a whale shark’s mouth with all the countries of the world in dots representing the whale sharks spots? Very clever!

We have 3 interesting days full of presentations from all over the world. Rachel Graham from the WCS presented some new work from Madagascar where she has been putting our acoustic tags. This was particularly relevant to us because we will be putting out tags with Rachel in November. It will start giving us an idea on whether we are sharing sharks with countries close by. We have also had fascinating talks by the Mexican delegation. They just have so many sharks here in Holbox - it is incredible! Look at this picture. Can you count how many sharks there are in the frame? Can you imagine what it must feel like to be surrounded by that many sharks?

The Indian representative Vivek Talwar gave a very good presentation too. The Indian story is another amazing one. In the area of Gujarat they used to slaughter whale sharks to export the meat and fins to Taiwan, China etc. Now thanks to a very ingenous campaign using religious leaders they have completely stopped the slaughter. Whale sharks in India are completely safe and this is so important as we suspect Gujarat may be a breeding area because they see many large females there. The Indian campaign focused on re-education, and it really worked!

They have made a life size whale shark which they take from village to village on their campaign. We plan to do this in Kenya as it has worked so well in India! It costs around USD500 to make so if you want to help us start this ball rolling please donate!

They use children to send the message that whale sharks need to be protected and that they are more valuable to us alive. Note that India has done very little research and has no real whale shark tourism yet they have an incredible whale shark conservation campaign. Watch this space for when they start doing research and perhaps tourism. It will be very interesting to see what happens.

Brent presented the research we have done todate which of course had everyone on the edge of their seats because we have put out the most number of satellite tags in one place on whale sharks EVER!! Here he is blowing everyone away with his data so far Again we don’t have all the results in yet and will have to wait for the tags to come off next year for all the answers.

Perhaps the most interesting and controversial presentation so far has been by Bruce Carlson from the Atlanta Aquarium where they currently have 4 whale sharks in captivity. Bruce made a really cohesive presentation and I will post about that tomorrow. I have some amazing photos on what they have been doing for whale sharks in Atlanta and how they transported the animals. Some people feel that large, highly migratory animals like whale sharks should not be held in captivity so his talk really provoked some very heated debate. I am interested to hear your views on this. The Atlanta Aquarium has proposed that they host the next conference. Some delegates immediately said they would boycott it! What do you think? I am going to tell you my views tomorrow when I do a full post on Atlanta.

A lot of the delegates have gone out whale shark watching but I wasn’t feeling well so have stayed in the village, grateful for a lie in and a chance to catch up with some work. We have had really long days during the conference because there is so much work to do. Here is a picture of the sunset here and on that note I will say goodbye until tomorrow!

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Category: Research | Date: Jul 13 2008 | By: whalesharks

Yesterday we went out tagging with Rachel Graham from WCS. We are going to put out accoustic tags in Kenya with Rachel in November. We met Rachel at the conference in Perth 3 years ago and it was great to meet up again after so long. Also on the boat was Rafael who is a representative from CONANP, Mexico’s national marine regulatory body. Rachel put out 2 accoustic tags, Rafael put out some streamer tags as well as taking biopsies and Volker took some amazing underwater footage of the sharks. I took pictures from the boat and had some fantastic swims with the sharks we saw. We also saw dolphins, 2 sets of mating turtles and hundreds of cow-nose rays which Volker managed to film which wasn’t easy because they were very shy and moving at an incredible speed. We will show you some of his video work when we get home next month. In the meantime here are some of my pictures.

Here is Rachel about to take some photos of a tagged shark.

This is Rachel’s husband Dan swimming alongside the shark.

 

It was incredible to see how the sharks feed mouths agape. The water was very clear on the surface but surprisingly murky (and cold!) once you got in.

This is the jetty with all the whale shark tourism boats. There are a total of 140 licensed whale shark watching boats here on Holbox island and people come here almost exclusively to swim with whale sharks.

Rachel has made some temporary tatoos - here is a picture of Volker and me with our whale shark tatoos on

Tomorrow we will finish off working on our presentations for the conference which starts on Tuesday. We will continue to keep you all updated on our work here on Holbox island.

Until then, all the best from Mexico!

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Category: Research, Uncategorized | Date: Jul 11 2008 | By: whalesharks

Greetings after a long time!

 Volker and I are finally here on Holbox Island 4 hours north of Cancun, Mexico. It was a lot of work but we managed to raise the funds to get here and as you can imagine it was a monster trip all the way from Diani Beach, Kenya. The conference starts next week and we are looking forward to it hugely. We will get a chance to present our work and show how much we have done since the last conference 3 years ago. It is exciting because we really have done an enormous amount! We also get a chance to meet up with all our whale shark friends and learn about what they have been doing in their parts of the world. It will be a fascinating global showcase of whale sharks research and conservation efforts.

I promise to upload some photos to keep you all posted on this the 2nd International Whale Shark Conference in history.

Thanks and do keep reading our blog!

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