Whale Sharks

Category: Community work | Date: Aug 26 2008 | By: whalesharks

Diving The Crab has saved another turtle. This time a little Olive Ridley turtle. Olive Ridley turtles are generally small with a thin, heart-shaped shell. They can weigh up to 45kg(100lb) and grow up to 75cm (30inches). They feed on both animal and vegetable material - crabs, jelly fish and when times are hard they will feed mostly on algae.

You can see how horribly tangled it is in the deadly net.

Thank you to the Diving The Crab team in Diani for saving yet another turtle. Any donation you make will go directly to this turtle project. We need to urgently stop the fishermen from using these nets. You can help us by donating.

Thank you!

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Category: Fundraising | Date: Aug 19 2008 | By: whalesharks

Hello everyone!

I received this email from Jane Spilsbury in Watamu. She and her husband Steve Trott used to run the Watamu Turtle Watch. I have posted in earlier blogs about the fantastic work they do. This is a picture of Jane and Steve working with a small turtle who was sick.

Turtles get constipated really easily. When this happens they have to be force-fed a special solution to unblock them. First you have to hold their little mouths open with a stick.

Then you insert the tube with the medication. As you can see it is involved, delicate work. We watched Steve and Jane help turtles all morning on our visit with them.

Please have a read of the below and try to help Lesley who also does critical work in Australia. She has helped the Watamu Turtle Watch on numerous occasions so we now must help her.

Thank you! 

Dear Friends, Many of you will be familiar with internationally renowned Lesley Baird who runs CHELONIA Wildlife Rehabilitation & Release Centre in Broome, Australia. Lesley has worked tirelessly and single-handedly to rehabilitate sick and injured wildlife for the last 8 years, an operation which she finances herself.  For five years she has advised Watamu Turtle Watch on the rehabilitation of sea turtles, often speaking at length on a daily basis in respect of critical patients. She has helped WTW save over 50 sick sea turtles during Steve Trott’s and my time with WTW. She devotes her time selflessly, 7 days a week, often working over 12 hours a day. Unfortunately the future of Chelonia is threatened. Below is a précis of a plea directly from Lesley made to the Broome community. Please click on Chelonia’s website below to make a donation however small. Thank you for your time, and please pass this message on to anyone you think can help- Jane Spilsbury 

Hello   …   Chelonia is a not-for-profit, fully volunteer facility which specializes in the rehabilitation and release of wild birds and reptiles, including sea snakes and endangered sea turtles.Since 2000 when I established Chelonia I have personally carried nearly all the costs of operation. Now that Chelonia takes in around 700 patients per year I find that I can no longer afford to keep Chelonia running without outside financial assistance.It costs an average of Aus$350 per week to keep Chelonia running, this money covers food, special dietary formulas, and medications. No overheads such as phone, car, or office supplies are included, I will continue to cover those expenses myself. There is no other organization operating in Broome which cares for birds or reptiles. If Chelonia is forced to close there will be nobody to take in those 700 or so patients each year. This means that if you find a bird or reptile which needs help there will be nobody to take it to, and it will most probably have to be euthanased.  Thank you for taking the time to read this email. It will be wonderful if you can donate any amount to help keep Chelonia running. Any donation that you can afford will  be very gratefully received.  You can make your donation by clicking on the web link below. On the HOME page you will find a donation facility which will enable you to make a Credit Card donation through PayMate, OR you can mail a cheque to the address listed below. Thank you     …  

Lesley Baird  

PO Box3266
Broome, Western Australia, 6725
http://www.multiculturalwa.net.au/chelonia  

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Category: Community work | Date: Aug 16 2008 | By: whalesharks

Diving The Crab is one of the leading dive operators here in Diani. You can check out their website www.divingthecrab.com for some super diving information and packages.

Daniel the manager has been working tirelessly with the local fishermen in an attempt to get them to release turtles that get caught in their nets. For each turtle that they release the fishermen are given a small reward to encourage better fishing practices. Whenever the fishermen have to cut their nets the arrangement is that they bring their nets plus entangled turtle to Danny for him to deal with. The fishermen bring the turtle to the Diving The Crab dive base in their dug out canoes.

Danny and his team will carefully remove the net and release the turtle back into the ocean.

Without Danny’s intervention these turtles would have drowned to death in the nets. It is so important to stop the use of the nets, in particular the habit the fishermen have of putting them on our coral reefs. I cannot begin to tell you how damaging these nets are to our marine life. I have described the huge problems they cause in earlier entries to this blog.

Together with dive operators like Diving The Crab we hope to encourage the fishermen to stop using the nets altogether. The initiative that Danny has started is a fantastic way to getting to know the fishermen and although our aim is get them to stop this method of fishing, having them bring the turtles to us is a good start. They also realise that they can release the turtle themselves so sometimes they don’t need to bring the turtles ashore and will just let Danny know that they have released a turtle. So far they have released 7 turtles which is brilliant. They are now more aware and educated thanks to Diving The Crab’s intervention.

We hope to get everyone in our community to work together to save our turtles.

These turtles pictured say a BIG THANK YOU to everyone at Diving The Crab!!

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Category: Research | Date: Aug 15 2008 | By: whalesharks

Today Simon our resident volunteer has gone up to Kilifi to see if he can track down a tag that came ashore there. He doesn’t have a GPS because we were only borrowing the one we used last time but he is armed nonetheless with pretty accurate maps of the area and locations of the last known coordinates. This is his second attempt to find this tag as he went up to Kilifi at a few days ago but was unsuccessful.

 We are wishing him all the best with his search.

Here he is holding the 2 tags we found last time -

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Category: Media | Date: Aug 13 2008 | By: whalesharks

Not really whale shark news - but worth a mention!!

Stany Nyandwi, who left his family, his home, and his homeland behind when he helped stage a daring transport of orphaned chimpanzees out of war-torn Burundi to safety in 1995, has been named a Disney Conservation Hero for 2008.

Nyandwi is the head caregiver at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda, which is home to 48 orphaned chimpanzees. Despite little formal education, he is regarded among the most knowledgeable chimpanzee welfare experts in Africa.

Nyandwi will receive a plaque and a $500 prize for being named a Disney Conservation Hero, an annual awards program developed by the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund that “recognizes conservation initiatives are only as successful as the community and the local people involved with the project.”

This marks the second consecutive year a representative of the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA) has earned a Disney Conservation Hero award. In 2007, Jonathan Kang of the Limbe Wildlife Centre in Cameroon was honored.

“PASA is extremely proud of Stany Nyandwi and the work he has accomplished on behalf of chimpanzees in East Africa,” said Doug Cress, executive director of PASA. “Stany’s dedication to chimpanzees – even when it meant possibly losing his family or his own life – is remarkable. He is yet another shining example of the courage and commitment we see every day at PASA sanctuaries across Africa.”

Born in Burundi, Nyandwi had only rudimentary education when he applied for a job as a housekeeper / cook at the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) chimpanzee project there in 1989. At the time, the JGI-Burundi functioned as a halfway house for confiscated orphan chimpanzees, but so many were arriving and in such poor condition that Nyandwi was quickly converted from a cook to a chimpanzee caregiver. He had a particular affinity and connection with the youngest – and often most damaged – chimpanzees, and he quickly developed a specialty in reviving those closest to death.

But Burundi was a volatile and dangerous place by the mid-1990s, and Nyandwi’s Hutu ethnicity made him a target for pro-Tutsi military forces. A daily six-mile trek to and from work meant Nyandwi often had to walk in the dark, a practice that grew more dangerous when two JGI-Burundi staff members were murdered in 1994. Despite the risks, Nyandwi usually arrived early for work and stayed late.

At the end of 1995, JGI decided it was no longer viable or safe to keep the sanctuary going in Burundi announced plans to relocate all 20 chimpanzees to the newly created Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. But while Nyandwi was eager to help transfer the chimpanzees, he knew his decision to leave Burundi would not permit him to return to his wife and two children. At that time, those who left Burundi were labeled as traitors or rebels, and were often arrested and charged with treason upon their return.

Nyandwi, who had never flown before, traveled in a small plane with 10 chimpanzees in plastic pet carriers to Kenya. For the next six weeks, Nyandwi was left alone in Kenya to care for the 10 infants. Away from his family, his countrymen and living alone, Nyandwi thought of nothing but the chimpanzees, and on several occasions walked five kilometers and used his own salary to buy food and medical supplies for the infants.

“My heart is with the chimps,” Nyandwi said. “I care for them like my own children. People are killing chimps in the forest, the babies are suffering. They need us to take care of them.”

After helping the chimpanzees acclimate to their new home in Kenya, Nyandwi was asked to stay and train the Sweetwaters staff. He then transferred to the new JGI chimpanzee program in Uganda, and stayed in touch with his family in whatever way he could, sending funds to ensure their survival and welfare. In the end, after almost three years of letter-writing and government appeals, Nyandwi’s family was allowed to join him in Uganda.

Today, Nyandwi is the head caregiver for Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary. His main role is the welfare of the chimpanzees in his care, and many visitors to the island comment on Nyandwi’s “special” relationship with the chimpanzees.

PASA was formed in 2000 to unite the sanctuaries that care for chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, drills and literally thousands of other endangered primates across Africa. For more information, please visit www.pasaprimates.org or contact PASAapes@aol.com. 

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Category: Education | Date: Aug 09 2008 | By: whalesharks

The Georgia Aquarium has 4 whale sharks in captivity. They are held in a pool the size of a football stadium and it is 10 metres deep. Although 2 of their previous sharks died all of the 4 sharks they have now appear to be doing well. As I told you the presentation made at the conference about the Georgia Aquarium was a very cohesive, coherent and illuminating account.

The whale sharks were taken from Taiwan. They were apparently on the slaughter list and if this is the case then they were indeed saved from a gruesome death. If you think about the mechanices involved in getting a whale shark from Taiwan all the way to Atlanta, Georgia you might start to appreciate the lengths they went to!! First they had to be found and coralled into a net at sea then herded into a netted pool where they were kept for some time (2 weeks I think). This gave the sharks a chance to get used to people.

It also gave them a chance to get used to being hand fed.

They were then scooped up out of this pool…

And deposited into their container which would be home for the next 36 hours.

Because they were so important they got a police escort to the airport like the proper VIPS they are! This was the only picture that made me smile during the presentation (albeit a rather small smile).

And then they were loaded in the plane for the long journey to Atlanta. The plane was fully sponsored by UPS for USD 1 million, yes that’s right, USD 1 MILLION.

When they arrived in Atlanta the same process was repeated and they were finally released into their new home. Divers were stationed round the edges so they could orientate themselves properly and not get confused by the glass. They are examined regularly and for the first time we get pictures like these: this is the inside of a whale shark’s mouth -

They do regular gastric sampling which involves sticking a huge tube down their throats.

And (drum roll please) the inside of a whale shark’s stomach - I bet you haven’t seen that before!

Many people don’t agree with holding highly migratory animals in captivity. To be honest, I think it’s terrible. Volker, along with many others, disagrees with me. He says that everyone who goes to the aquarium and sees a whale shark will become a whale shark ambassador. I do hope he is right. I don’t agree with keeping a whale shark in an aquarium to make money (because let’s face it, that’s what this is really about). It has been scientifically proven that whale sharks dive down to hundreds of metres several times a day. They travel thousands of miles, peacefully cruising our seas. How can it be ok to stick them in a pool the size of football stadium? It doesn’t sit well with me. You are now able to swim with the whale sharks in the aquarium too for (I think) USD200.

Having said that, the Georgia Aquarium takes really good care of the sharks. They are healthy and seemingly happy. They are in much better shape than the poor sharks in the Japanese aquarium in Okinawa. Someone told me that the sharks there have sores on their fins from bumping into the glass all the time.

These kids are watching a whale shark and it’s probably the most amazing thing they have ever seen. The reasoning is that a lot of people will not have the opportunity to see a whale shark in the wild.

Bruce Carlson was peppered with questions after his talk on the Georgia Aquarium. People wanted to know where they would get their whale sharks from in future now that Taiwan has banned the whale shark trade. He wouldn’t tell us. He did say something that struck me as true though - he said we don’t live in a perfect world. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to hold any animals in captivity at all. There is no doubt that we are learning a great deal about whale sharks thanks to those in the Georgia Aquarium. I suppose it’s all about where you draw a line and whether you feel the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

For me, I look at the misty mountains in the top picture of the Taiwanese coast where the sharks were captured and my overwhelming feeling is one of great sadness.

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Category: Media | Date: Aug 07 2008 | By: whalesharks

This makes for depressing but critical reading. “Samaki” is the word for fish in swahili. It’s quite a lengthy article but it’s very worthwhile reading.

How the world’s oceans are running out of fish:

The future of our seas has never been more precarious. Ninety years of industrial-scale overfishing has brought us to the brink of an ecological catastrophe and deprived millions of their livelihoods. As scientific guidelines are ignored and catches become ever bigger, Alex Renton tells why the international community has failed to act

This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday May 11 2008 on p28 of the Focus section. It was last updated at 01:32 on May 11 2008.

A tuna transport floating tank being towed from the fishing grounds off Libya to tuna ranches off Sicily, Italy. Photograph: AFP/Gavin Newman

It is early morning in Barcelona’s La Boqueria market and the fish stallholders are setting out their wares. Mounds of pink and grey glisten down the dim alleys - shoppers and tourists peering at the fins and tentacles. It is not like any fish shop in Britain - some stalls sell five different species of squid and cuttlefish, half a dozen types of shrimp and prawn, 10 different cuts of salt cod. It is a fish eater’s haven in the heart of a city that eats and sells more fish than anywhere else in Europe.

Anyone who cares about where their fish come from - and this should mean anyone who wants to go on eating them - should take two tools when they visit the fishmonger. One is the handy guidance provided by the Marine Conservation Society, Fish to Avoid and Fish to Eat (the latter is still the longer); the other is a ruler. My ruler is the type handed out to commercial fishermen by the international advisory body, Incofish, and has pictures of key species with marks indicating when they can be considered mature (and, thus, OK to catch).

So I set about lining up my ruler against the La Boqueria fish, starting with the mackerel (should be 34cm), the plaice (39cm) and the redfish (45cm). All turn out to be mere babies. The mackerel is half the designated length. A glance around the stalls shows 10 or more species on the MCS’s Avoid list, including hake, swordfish, monkfish, bluefin tuna and, of course, cod.

I don’t spend much time doing this because the Catalan fishmongers don’t like my ruler - or me. They don’t want to talk about why they are selling tiny hake (one of Europe’s most endangered species) and why not a single fish in the market has any ’sustainable’ labelling.

One old lady asks me what I’m after. ‘I want to know why the Spanish are eating so many undersized fish from populations that are running out,’ I say. ‘It’s simple,’ she says. ‘We like fish and small fish taste better.’

Is anyone not aware that wild fish are in deep trouble? That three-quarters of commercially caught species are over-exploited or exploited to their maximum? Do they not know that industrial fishing is so inefficient that a third of the catch, some 32 million tonnes a year, is thrown away? For every ocean prawn you eat, fish weighing 10-20 times as much have been thrown overboard. These figures all come from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which also claims that, of all the world’s natural resources, fish are being depleted the fastest. With even the most abundant commercial species, we eat smaller and smaller fish every year - we eat the babies before they can breed.

Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at York University, predicts that by 2050 we will only be able to meet the fish protein needs of half the world population: all that will be left for the unlucky half may be, as he puts it, ‘jellyfish and slime’. Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has, he and most scientists agree, led to ‘ecological meltdown’. Whole biological food chains have been destroyed.

Many of those fish you can see in such glorious abundance in Spanish markets - and on our own supermarket shelves - come not from European seas but from the coasts of the continents of the poor: Africa, South America and parts of Asia. Fishermen have always roamed far afield - the Basques began fishing the great cod populations off Newfoundland at least 500 years ago. And when serious shortages in traditional stocks around Europe began to be commercially apparent 30 years ago, the trawler fleets began to move south.

Strangely one of the first international attempts to conserve fish stocks, especially for the more easily exploited nations, also became part of the disaster. The United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, signed in 1979, extended national rights over fisheries to 200 miles from a country’s coasts. But it included a provision that, if fish stocks in that zone were surplus to national needs, the country could sell its rights to outsiders. That convention allowed cash-strapped and sometimes corrupt countries in west Africa to raise funds by letting the industrial trawler fleets in. Since 1979 the EU has negotiated deals on fishing rights with a string of impoverished African countries. Despite the EU’s own studies indicating massive and quite possibly irreversible damage to fish stocks off west Africa, these deals continue to be struck.

In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four years’ fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts, for just $4m a year. In 2006, access for 43 giant EU factory fishing vessels to Mauritania’s long coastline was bought for £24.3m a year. It’s estimated that these deals have put 400,000 west African fishermen out of work; some of them now take to the sea only as ferrymen for desperate would-be migrants to the Canary Islands and Europe. And among the millions of Africans who depend on fish as their main source of protein, consumption has declined from 9kg per year to 7kg.

North Atlantic fish stocks have been in decline for well over a century. Callum Roberts points out in his recent book The Unnatural History of the Sea that it was obvious from the 1880s that fish stocks were in decline. Fish catch records from the 1920s onwards show that, despite the enormous improvements in boat design and trawling technology and better refrigeration, catches of the great Atlantic species, such as haddock, cod, hake and turbot, remained constant or slowly declined. As they have ever since.

Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal - a deal in the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-heralded disaster with our fish?

‘Quite simply,’ Roberts says, ‘agreements and deals brokered by politicians will never be satisfactory. They always look for the short-term fix.’ He and his team at York University did a survey of the last 20 years of EU ministerial decisions on fish catches and found that, on average, they set quotas for fishing fleets 15 to 30 per cent higher than those recommended as safe by scientists.

‘What that figure doesn’t tell you is that often, for less threatened species like mackerel or whiting, they have set quotas 100 per cent higher than the science recommended. So, in their efforts to pacify the industry, they are bringing populations that could be sustainably fished into the risk zone,’ he said.

The fishing industry, Roberts feels, has exerted excessive influence on politicians in Europe’s Atlantic nations since the 18th century - when it was necessary to keep the fleets well manned, as a source of seamen for their navies when war broke out.

Europe is by far the worst criminal among the developed nations. It is in the Far East, in Japan and Korea, that most fish are eaten, per head - the Japanese eat 66kg each a year, as opposed to Spain’s 44kg and Britain’s 20kg. But the Chinese (at 25kg) alone eat around a third of the world’s fish, and, as with meat, the fish proportion of their diet is soaring as the population gets more wealthy. (The fact that much Asian fish is farmed is little consolation - their feed may often be derived from wild fish.)

According to Greenpeace, Chinese fishing fleets are among the most rapacious when it comes to hoovering up the stocks of small nations in the Pacific and Atlantic. But in no Asian country is the notion of sustainable fishing much developed among consumers - and it is from consumers that any demand for change must come. Because, as Roberts and all the green lobby groups note, the structures and organisations set up by politicians and industry to control fisheries, or even preserve the most endangered species, have entirely failed.

The Observer went to see one of these bodies in action in Tokyo a few weeks ago. ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, is an obscure - if you’re not in the tuna business - Madrid-based organisation that spends some €2.3m (£1.8m) of EU taxpayers’ money a year collating and commissioning scientific research, and holding meetings for the 45 nations with an interest in the tuna-type species in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. These include the US, Japan, China and the UK. If you work for ICCAT, it’s a high air miles life: Tokyo in March, Florianopolis, Brazil, next month. This is all in the cause of conserving tuna, of course. Which ICCAT, all observers agree, has utterly failed to do.

In fact, the commission is a joke: known in the business as the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas. Sergi Tudela, the World Wildlife Fund’s head of fisheries for the Mediterranean, doesn’t find it funny. ‘ICCAT is a treaty, and some of its contracting parties pervert the spirit of it to ensure their overfishing of tuna continues,’ he says. Roberts agrees. ‘ICCAT doesn’t do what it says it does - it doesn’t conserve. Instead it presides over the decline and collapse of tuna stocks.’

After the first day’s talks the Japanese government threw an ICCAT party. Delegates - fishermen, industry moguls, scientists, lobbyists and fisheries ministry reps - stood around chatting politely, sipping their drinks, in a grand carpeted conference room. Some very senior EU fisheries people were there, but not Mitsubishi, the enormous Japanese company that buys most European tuna. It pulled out at the last moment.

Silver plates in hand, the delegates tackled the buffet. Among the crabmeat pilaf and stewed chicken, there were several platters of sushi. There were nigiri rolls with slivers of raw-red belly meat on top - probably bluefin tuna, the most endangered commercially exploited fish in the world and most likely brought to Japan by Mitsubishi. Bluefin is also the world’s most expensive fish - a tuna that was sold in Tokyo’s Tsukiji market this year went to a Hong Kong-based trader for the price of a top-of-the-range Mercedes.

Tudela, who’d been hopeful of this meeting, seemed depressed when we caught up with him in Tokyo. The Japanese had talked of reining back their Mediterranean operations. It is they who buy much of the bluefin tuna which is caught in the eastern Atlantic, often outside quotas; or caught young and fattened in cages in the Mediterranean. ‘The Atlantic bluefin fishery is unsustainable in every way - economically, socially and ecologically,’ said Tudela. ‘But the fishing fleet keeps getting bigger. There are six new reefers [large tuna-catching boats] linked to the Japanese in the region. I think the fishing industry is starting to feel really hijacked by the Japanese.’

ICCAT may be the most ineffective international organisation of all time. In the course of its 42-year life, several tuna species in the Mediterranean and Atlantic have come near disappearing, and nearly all are in grave danger. Despite the endless conferences and scientific studies sponsored by ICCAT and member nations, WWF’s analysis shows that catches of bluefin tuna, a ‘critically endangered species’, according to the standards of the respected World Conservation Union, are ‘dramatically higher’ than the quotas set. And that catches are consistently under-reported, or not reported at all.

While EU ministers promise action on illegal fishing of tuna, they also continue to underwrite the tuna fishing industry through massive subsidies: €16m (£13.1m) has been spent in recent years on the European purse seining fleet alone, according to the international lobbying group Oceana.

Xavier Pastor, its director in Europe, says bluntly: ‘The over-exploitation of the bluefin tuna has been promoted and financed by European taxpayers and continues through the subsidising of operating costs, such as fuel.’

The problem for many observers is not just that ICCAT is ineffectual, but that it may be doing more harm than good. ‘If you announce, as ICCAT did two years ago, an “emergency fisheries recovery” plan, then you are telling the concerned public that something is being done about the problem. But it isn’t - the fisheries recovery plan is a misnomer,’ says Roberts.

ICCAT refused requests for an interview, telling us to go and look at its website instead.

Is there any hope for fish? If we cannot sort out the problem of bluefin tuna - a highly prized fish, whose life cycle is well understood, and whose fishing is closely monitored - what hope is there for the other stocks? Will our children eat wild fish or only farmed? Tudela sees some encouraging movement in Europe - the French, major tuna fishers, have for the first time prosecuted some quota-busting fishermen. At European Commission level, he thinks the problems are being taken a little more seriously.

Roberts has one solution: marine reserves. Protecting up to 40 per cent of the world’s oceans in permanent refuges would enable the recovery of fish stocks and help replenish surrounding fisheries. ‘The cost, according to a 2004 survey, would be between £7bn and £8.2bn a year, after set-up. But put that against the £17.6bn a year we currently spend on harmful subsidies that encourage overfishing.’

Reserves must not be ruled by politicians, says Roberts. ‘The model of industry-political control for regulatory bodies just doesn’t work. It’s like central banks - put them under politicians’ control and they make dangerous, short-term decisions that result in economic instability. Put them under independent control, and they make better-judged, more strategic decisions.’

The Newfoundland cod fishery, for 500 years the world’s greatest, was exhausted and closed in 1992, and there’s still no evidence of any return of the fish. Once stocks dip below a certain critical level, the scientists believe, they can never recover because the entire eco-system has changed. The question is whether, after 50 years of vacillation and denial, there’s any prospect of the politicians acting decisively now. ‘It is awful and we are on the road to disaster,’ says Tudela. ‘But the collapse - in some, not all the situations - is still reversible. And it’s worth trying.’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/11/fishing.food

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Category: Media | Date: Aug 01 2008 | By: whalesharks

We are finally home after the 2nd International Whale Shark Conference. It was a wonderful event. We all learnt a great deal and have committed to continued global efforts towards whale shark conservation.

 Our internet connection is really poor at the moment so I can’t upload all the pictures as I promised from the Georgia Aquarium. I promise I will as soon as I  can.

In the meantime here is an article from a Mexican newspaper about the conference. If you don’t speak Spanish - as we say here in Kenya “pole sana” (very sorry!!) but neither do I!! I have no idea what it says but there was huge interest in the conference from the local and internation media. We were all left in doubt of the power of the whale shark - it can draw a monster crowd and this must be harnessed to increase interest in marine conservation.

Help us spread the good news!

Have a great weekend!

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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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