the fishermen and tourism operators here
they were only seeing whale sharks for a
few months a year over the over the
summer when we started tagging the
sharks though with small acoustic tags
and we’ve got a network of receivers out
here in the bay we started finding that
actually the whale sharks don’t leave
they just move slightly further offshore
and slightly deeper and they don’t come
to the surface quite as often one of my
jobs while I’m here mafia is to take
tissue biopsies of the whale sharks
usually those bits of tissue that less
than one gram so it’s a very small
amount and the Sharks very very rarely
react some of the things that the tissue
samples can tell us about is that they
can actually give us an idea of the
location of the sharks and where they
spend most of their time for example the
profiles from the fatty acid analysis
have shown that although the Sharks do
mostly feed in the shrimp here they also
have other diet preferences out in deep
litter at night so we can actually use
it to show that the Sharks often stay in
an area such as mafia we can prove that
biochemically
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even though whale chefs are quite a
popular species with divers and
scientists there’s still a lot we don’t
know about and some of the stuff we
don’t know is really fundamental we
don’t know how old they are when they
become adults we don’t know how old they
get here we can get to know individuals
so we can learn a lot about what whale
sharks are doing over their lifespan
it’s pretty crazy and that the whale
sharks here often look like a mobile
ecosystem there’s loads of other species
of fish that are feeding on the same
stuff they’ll often associate with the
whale shark so you’ll get this huge
cloud of fish biomass just moving around
often
almost completely blocking the shark
from view other probes the largest
addition though was very important for
the Y Shack because the sign for the
fish is for the mackerel and sometimes
the tuna fish
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the issues are likely to be of the
fishermen accidentally getting whale
shark in the net and it can be quite
difficult and quite dangerous to free
such a large animal so one of the things
we’re working at here is just helping
the Fisher’s to be able to safely
release them and as much as possible
trying to avoid catching them in the
first place as a conservation biologist
one of the things that particularly
motivates my research is that whale
sharks now are globally endangered
species as of 2016 we think their
populations have have over the last few
decades and that’s purely due to human
influence so we’ve got to make sure that
places like this remain a century and
the way of sharks because they spend so
much time here we’ve really got to try
and minimize the human threats and just
help them recover as a species
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