I arrived in Exmouth on the 16th July to help Brad Norman and his research on the world largest fish, the whale shark (Rhincodon typus). I met Brad earlier in the year in New York, when he came along to the dinner at the Explorers Club. He is also a Rolex Award winner, being awarded the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2006 for his work with whale sharks. I am here to help with the research done by Brad and his non-for-profit group, ECOCEAN (http://ecocean.org) that works to generate public awareness for marine conservation issues.
ECOCEAN also encourages and facilitates quality research, with a particular focus on creating a worldwide whale shark photo-identification library (www.whaleshark.org). The library uses photographs of the skin patterning behind the gills of each shark, these patterns do not change over time; hence it is like a human fingerprint allowing the identification of individual animals.
Upon arrival, I met with Brad and three Earthwatch volunteers (www.earthwatch.org) that were here for the week, also staying in the house are two other researchers; George Shedrawi and Helen Shortland-Jones. Together we have done three trips along Ningaloo reef to swim with the whale sharks.
The first trip, we drove 1.5 hrs south to Coral Bay and spent a glorious day on the water cruising along Ningaloo reef and snorkelling at some beautiful spots. Unfortunately we did not find any sharks (first time there has been a no-show in over a month!) although we were lucky enough to see (from the boat) the rest of the macrofauna that calls Ningaloo reef home; manta rays, humpback whales, dolphins, turtles, sharks, huge groper, and a dugong!
The format for the week is to go out on the boat one day then spend the next day at home analysing photographs and uploading to the website database. The website and custom made software, has been developed and managed by Jason Holmberg (based in Oregon USA). The database holds a vast amount of whale shark sightings and using an algorithm adapted from that developed by NASA scientists for mapping the stars, it provides likely matches to individual sharks or the confirmed sighting of a new shark.
To date there has been over 1400 individual sharks identified using input from over 39 countries. Many of the sharks are re-sighted around Ningaloo, and to date none of these sharks have tuned up in other countries. But with an increased awareness and reported sightings coming in from around the world, it is likely to see how connected the populations of whale sharks are around the world.
We did two other trips out from near Exmouth on the northern part of Ningaloo and the first trip we swam with two out of three sharks. I have always wanted to swim with these sharks and the experience didn’t disappoint, it was so awesome swimming with such a huge gentle animal amongst a sea of blue water. The other trip was even better and we were able to swim with five different sharks. The size of the sharks ranged from about 3 to 8 m, some stay on the surface and allow multiple swims and others only stay on the surface for a short period of time. We had a couple that were quite inquisitive and followed us around in circles!
Community involvement and ‘citizen science’ is working very well for this project and anyone can use their own photos and identify their ‘own’ whale shark allowing them to be informed on future sightings of the shark that they swam with! During this week have learnt a great deal about the new technology and software that is allowing scientists to monitor species in new ways. I have learnt how to submit and match images in the database, I have learnt about recent tagging work that has been done on these sharks and other animals, and I have been helping with the use of stereo video cameras to accurately measure the size of the sharks (but more about that next post).
