My PhD student, Ana Sequeira, has just written a great little guest blog post for the Environment Institute‘s blog. Given I’m en route to Tasmania for a quick consultancy meeting, I thought I’d let myself off the hook and reproduce the post here. Well done, Ana (and hint to my other students – your time on ConservationBytes.com is coming…).
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This week is Seaweek and guest blogger Ana Sequeira describes how whale shark distribution might be shifting according to seasonal environmental predictors.
Ana Sequeira is a PhD student at the University of Adelaide (Global Ecology Group). Her main research interests are to develop models applied to the marine environment to describe key environmental processes, species distribution patterns and ecological interactions.
The main objective of her PhD thesis is to investigate behavioural ecology of whale sharks. She is now trying to understand which environmental variables may affect whale shark distribution.
The whale shark (Rhincodon typus, Smith 1828) is the largest fish in the ocean and can reach more than 12 m in total length. Although little is known about their habitat selection or migration patterns, the whale shark appears to be a highly mobile species. They predictably form near shore aggregations in some coastal locations (e.g. off Ningaloo reef in Western Australia) what makes them the subject of highly lucrative marine ecotourism industries. Also, artisanal and small-scale fisheries for the species still exist in many parts of the tropics.
Since the whale sharks is classified a Vulnerable species (IUCN Red List), understanding their migratory behaviour became of chief importance as they can be travelling from regions where they are protected to regions where they are still harvested. Read the rest of this entry »
ConservationBytes.com 