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The
first of this seasons whale sharks have been sighted off
Mahe; a group of 12 sharks were found in the last week of
May some 14 miles off the South West of Mahe by the crew of
Reel Time, one of the boats that work on the MCSS
monitoring programme. The following week the first
in-water encounter was reported of a 3.5 metre shark by
divers from the Underwater Centre, diving at Shark Bank .
Two
of the divers Thomas Kasper and Marion Dagner were able to
capture a series of photographs of the shark. After running
these through the photo-identification program IRIS and comparing
them to the 400+ sharks in the Seychelles database, MCSS
staff concluded that this was indeed a new shark for
Seychelles.
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The
first whale shark of the 2008 season in Seychelles
. Image Thomas Kasper
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A
few days later staff and volunteers from the Global Vision
International (GVI) project at Cap Ternay encountered a
4.5 metre shark and then found two others shortly
afterwards. Photos were taken and we are looking forward
to running them against the database to find out if these
are also new animals to the area.
These
sightings so early in the year may seem unusual but MCSS
records have shown that there are often several whale
shark sightings at the very beginning of the South East
season around June but then the sharks seem to move off
again before coming back in large numbers from August
onwards.
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| Another
image of the 3.5m whale shark, the first of the
2008 season in Seychelles . Image Thomas Kasper |
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With
the introduction of the IRIS spot matching programme to
assist with photo-identification and the availability of
affordable underwater digital photography, the number of
uniquely identified individuals in the
Seychelles
database has grown dramatically over the last few years,
despite the low number of sharks found in 2007.
Interestingly, using scans from transparencies and
‘screen-grabs’ from videos taken in 2001 we were able
to create digital ‘fingerprints’ from 15 sharks, of
these 8 have been re-photographed in the years since then,
confirming that the Seychelles is a special area for a
large proportion of the sharks found here and that they
return on a regular basis.
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