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!