Dear all,
This years whale shark tagging expedition started off on the 25Th of February with whale sharks seen a total of 16 days out of 18 days. On the 12Th of March we saw (and swam with) a total of 7 sharks! The day after we had 8 sharks and swam with 4. We also saw one whale shark with a red identification tag and are now investigating where this tag came from! We also had our first ever female whale shark this year ( the first ever seen in 20 years!) which is quite remarkable considering that the norm until now has been juvenile males ranging between 3,5 - 7 meters, average size = 5 meters in length. This year we only tagged 3 sharks with acoustic tags. We had film teams from Germany, Kenya and England and a total of 4 documentaries are planned as a result. A total of 80 hours were logged flying our micro-light plane in search of whale sharks, most sharks where spotted between Kinondo and Chale Island but even outside Tiwi some sharks were spotted. The numbers have increased compared to last year but are still low compared to 2001-2009 season. Whale sharks are unfortunately targeted for their liver in Malindi, Lamu and Pate Island. Our tagging expeditions has led to some significant discoveries, 80 percent of the sharks tagged with pop-off archival satellite tags in 2008 actually stayed in kenyan waters all year while only 20 percent immigrated outside our waters. This revelation is very bad indeed because it means that our whale sharks are more vulnerable to fishing than previously believed!
Kind regards
Volker Bassen
