7/21/2023 0 Comments Sign of the whaleThis is true in Ningaloo Reef, Christmas Island, the Red Sea, the Galapagos, the Seychelles, Donsol in the Philippines, Isla Mujeres in the Caribbean, Baja California and elsewhere.īy comparison, many, but not all, of the whale sharks hang around Cenderawasih Bay. There are many places around the world with transient whale shark aggregations following seasonal food sources. “It’s opened up a lot of new doors of potential study in the future.” “Our tagging techniques in Cenderawasih Bay have been quite ground breaking,” says Abraham, who was in charge of the tagging process for all the Australian studies. Given the increased interest among adventurous divers and snorkelers wanting to swim with whale sharks and, monitored by Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) both of which are very active in the area, these fishermen now also receive a supplemental income from allowing sustainable tourism ventures to offer whale shark swims. They give them a small portion of their daily catch to keep them around. The fishermen on Cenderawasih Bay’s bagan platforms, anchored off shore for months at a time, have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the whale sharks, which they believe bring them good luck. Indonesia declared whale sharks a protected species in 2013 and, since 1993, Teluk Cenderawasih National Park, Indonesia’s largest marine park, has protected 14,000 square kilometres of the Bay, an area about the size of Greater Sydney. They can keep their growth rate up easily under the bagan nets. This is why the whale sharks, particularly fast-growing juvenile males, are here because it provides cost efficient foraging, the minimum energy output for the maximum energy intake. Indeed, renowned ichthyologist Dr Gerald Allen, a former curator at the Western Australian Museum and a consultant with Conservation International, calls Cenderawasih the Galapagos of the East because of the richness of its marine life. As a result, it has a high percentage of endemic coral and fish species found nowhere else on Earth. Looking like a big gulp out of the north coast of Papua in the far east of the Indonesian archipelago, Cenderawasih Bay was an ancient sea during the last Ice Age, separated from the flow of the Pacific Ocean. Whale shark feeding under bagan platforms in Cenderawasih Bay, Indonesia. It was the most spine-tingling experience. I swam with eight recently, one showing its research tag, as they wove all around me to filter feed bait fish thrown from a traditional bagan fishing platform. However, it’s only been six or seven years since they started liaising with international and Indonesian scientists to conduct whale shark research in Indonesian Papua’s remote Cenderawasih Bay, which has an estimated population of 135 mostly young male whale sharks, according to a research team from the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia.Ĭenderawasih (Bird of Paradise) Bay has become known as one of the best places in the world to swim with whale sharks. Mark and other Australian marine scientists have been researching whale sharks, officially listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, for more than 20 years at Western Australia’s Ningaloo Reef. There are so many clues to uncover both about our past and our future.” Dr Mark Meekan removing parasitic copepods from the lips of a whale shark for a genetics study, Ningaloo, Western Australia. We’re talking about convergent evolution, where two species with different ancestors develop similar characteristics. And what we learn from this research could also tell us about the whole sweep of evolution, how life in the oceans has evolved to culminate in giant filter-feeding sharks and whales that have emerged from very different origins. “We’re interested in how and why they stay in tropical waters. “Their whole metabolism is set by the warm water around them so they need lots of food to keep their basal metabolism going. “There probably hasn’t been a giant filter-feeding fish of that size living in tropical waters since the end of the dinosaur period, which makes the whale shark an enigma. “Whale sharks spend their entire lives moving around nutrient-poor tropical waters,” says Perth-based Dr Mark Meekan, Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
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