Whale sharks cooperatively tracked through Honduras, Belize and Mexico

http://www.UtilaWhaleSharkResearch.com

June 22, 2007

In the aftermath of another Whale Shark death at Georgia Aquarium, here is a group of researchers that are using ground breaking technology to achieve real research results with out the aid of financial backing from large companies, and are getting results in the wild.
Scientists have suspected for years that whale sharks (Rhindcodon typus) travel from the island of Utila, Honduras up through the waters of Belize to Mexico as part of a long, annual migration, but no individual whale shark has ever been cooperatively tracked by researchers in each country. Different research teams may see the same individuals along the route year after year, but never before has a team of scientists “connected the dots” on this spotted animal to track them between a series of different research stations. In 2007, broad cooperative efforts between researchers and ecotourists in the three countries are producing a more detailed picture of the behavior of these rare and “gentle giants”.

Tracking whale sharks isn’t easy. Traditional satellite and archival tags are expensive and have a very high failure rate that may be the result of the great depths that whale sharks can regularly dive to. These tags also generate data over only a few months, which is insufficient to create the long-term histories needed to model this population. To overcome these barriers, biologists and resort owners in Honduras, Belize, and Mexico have begun working within the ECOCEAN Whale Shark Photo-identification Library (http://www.whaleshark.org) to coordinate data collection and to use its NASA-inspired software (http://conbio.net/cip/article72insta.cfm) to analyze photographs collected from tourists and research staff and to identify individual whale sharks based on their natural spot patterning. The results of their efforts proved to be immediately fruitful.

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