Gentle Ocean Giant

March 10, 2008

Release from: Rupi Mangat
The East African

THE WHALE SHARK IS ONE OF THE MOST beautiful and biggest fishes in the world, yet we know little about it.

“On my first dive in Kenya,” says Volker Bassen, the originator of the East African Whale Shark Trust, now in its third year, “I saw a whale shark. It was the most beautiful fish l had ever seen. I was totally blown away by it. And it was just here, on this beach.”

This was in October 1991 in Diani on Mombasa’s South Coast, the famed beach of pure white sand forgiving the magical warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

The whale shark is truly awesome. In Kiswahili, it is called Papa Shillingi because its back looks like someone has flung a handful of gold coins on it. Local folklore has it that God was so pleased with the fish for its good deeds that he spread the coins on its back as a reward.

Despite being a shark, it is not a coldblooded predator. Instead, this gentle giant of the sea is a plankton feeder, feeding close to the coral reefs in tropical waters. Instead of the fearsome jaws of the shark, it has baleen teeth that filter the plankton into its mouth.

“But despite its being the largest fish in the world, we know almost next to nothing about it,” says Dr Brent S. Stewart, a senior research biologist from the Hubbs Seaworld Research Institute in San Diego, California. His team of researchers has teamed up with the East African Whale Shark Trust to tag the sharks with state-of-the art satellite tags that will help them map ways of saving the species from extinction.

A 2001 incident prompted Volker to become a whale shark activist. When I jokingly say that to be a shark tagger sounds an interesting profession , he replies, “It’s not a profession. It’s a passion.”

“I witnessed an occassion when fishermen caught a whale shark in their net. The caudal fin had become entangled in the net. The fishermen didn’t want to cut the net as it would destroy it. Instead, they cut off the fin of the whale shark.

“It was tragic. The shark was a young female in the prime of her child-bearing life. This was a life wasted because the fishermen cared nothing for the shark. Ninety per cent of the whale sharks along the Kenyan coast are males.”

This was therefore a double tragedy, because for a species to survive, as we all know, we need the female race.

For the shark, it was a slow painful death as its life bled away. “It was like chopping off someone’s feet,” Volker explains.

“When I saw that, I realised that something needed to be done to protect the fish, as there was no awareness programme about it.”

That was the beginning of the East African Whale Shark Trust. With no funding to work with, Volker was joined by a young woman, Nimu, Njonjo and Simon, a young volunteer.

The goal of the trust is to introduce more environmentally sustainable fishing methods to local fishermen. This means doing away with the fishing nets that the fishermen use and spreading public awareness.

“The fishermen use nylon nets with a 4-inch mesh. These were distributed under a project of the USAid to assist the local fishermen.

“These nylon nets have been outlawed in the US for 20 years. There are warehouses full of them in the US and they don’t know what to do with them.”

The fishermen spread the nylon nets in the evening near the coral reefs. What happens then is pure destruction.

“The fishermen use the nets when there is no moon so that the animals cannot see them. Every single day, there are seven to eight turtles caught in the nets.”

Even though turtles are creatures of the sea, they are amphibians and need to come to the surface for air. In the nets, they drown. “It is illegal to touch the dead turtles washed ashore,” says Volker.

“You know that nylon never rots,” continues Volker. “These nets when lost or left in the ocean become ghost nets trapping any animal that passes — like the turtles and the sharks, especially on moonless nights when they can’t see the nets. So what we do for every net brought to us by the local fishermen, we buy it from them and burn it.

“These nets are the biggest single threat to sea life today. They are also a very inefficient way of fishing. You can only use them when there’s no moon so that the fish don’t see them. But besides that, the fishermen have them spread out for 12 hours from sunset to sunrise and a lot of what they catch is thrown away.

But there is more of a health concern regarding people. The fish caught in the early hours are rotten because dead fish begin to rot after more than a few hours in the sea. But the fishermen dry them and sell them. Yet these fish carry diseases.

“We are teaching the local fishermen more eco-friendly ways of fishing. We are encouraging long line bottom fishing.”

The money for buying the bottom long lines is raised through various fundraising activities such as concerts and cottage industry initiatives such as making fibre-glass turtle shells from the moulds of turtles. There are also workshops conducted to train fishermen in sustainable methods of fishing and using the long lines.

A few years ago, Volker met Dr Stewart at the first international conference on the whale shark in Australia and invited him to visit Kenya with a view to starting a scientific project on the Kenyan coast.

Prior to this, there had never been anything on the whale shark’s status in Kenyan waters — in its absence we know nothing about its numbers, migration routes or even causes of death in the Kenyan coastal zone.

In the absence of such data, it is impossible to draw up any protection measures. It is also possible on the basis of ignorance to lose a species to extinction.

“There has been sporadic research done over the past 100 years,” remarks the softspoken American scientist, who spends most of his time diving in the freezing waters of Antarctica.

“In the mid 1980s, a colleague called Fay Wolfson collected records of the whale shark and summarised them. It got some of us interested. So, with satellite technology, we started to follow up on Fay’s work.

“What we do know roughly is that there are 250,000 breeding females spread over the planet — but we don’t know how many whale sharks there are altogether.

“In 1991, we tagged whale sharks in Bajha California. Whale sharks are found in tropical waters near the coral reefs. But we don’t know a lot about the affects of climate change on coral reefs. This is important to know because it directly affects the whale shark.”

However, from a holistic point of view, coral reef walls without the whale shark could suffer too. As plankton feeders, they keep a balance between the plankton and the corals. Too much plankton could possibly smother the live coral and degrade it.

Accompanying the team is a young volunteer from Switzerland, David French, working for the Antinea Foundation. After this expedition, he will be part of the team on a 33-metre long schooner called Fleur de Passion (flower of passion). The schooner will be fully equipped with a scientific laboratory and a robotic device that will descend into the ocean depths and transmit information via the satellite to web TV.

“We will be partnering with scientific researchers and be sailing to remote places, spending long periods of time to record the state of affairs in the world’s oceans.”

Reading the December 2007 issue of Our Planet, the UNEP magazine, you come across heightened concern about the seas. About 80 per cent of all marine pollution is from land, because we use the ocean as a global dumpsite.

There is also evidence that massive amounts of man-made carbon dioxide are being absorbed by the ocean surface, making it a sink for greenhouse gases. The carbon dioxide, on dissolution in seawater, forms carbonic acid that destroys the skeletons of sea creatures, especially those found around the reef walls, such as the corals and sea stars. This eventually erodes the reefs.

In 1987, collapsed fisheries numbered 15 percent globally. Now it’s double that figure. Twenty years ago, a fifth of fish stocks were overexploited. Today the figure has increased to 40 per cent. In 2004, there were around 149 dead zones in the seas.

This figure has increased to 200 – and most of it can be attributed to pollution which has led to de-oxygenation the waters.

There is a lot of excitement as clients wait to board the speedboat with the researchers on Diani Beach. The gyrocopter has spotted turtles, dolphins and stingrays on a flight in the early morning but no whale sharks.

“It is easier to spot the animals from the air than from the boat,” says Nimu who is co-ordinating the expedition.

Once in the boat, we follow the gyrocopter to the deep sea all the time staying close to the coral reef wall. Pods of dolphins slip in and out of the water. Not far from here, based in Mkwiro village on Wasini Island, Global Vision International started the first scientific research project on dolphins in Kenyan waters to find out more about their migratory movements and status and to map future conservation programmes and policies.

A whale shark is finally spotted from the air and the speedboat goes full throttle to reach it. The gigantic fish, almost 10 metres long, shows only its dorsal fin, the one that send chills down the spine thanks to the movie, Jaws.

Volker and Brent are in the water in a flash — Volker with his innovated spear gun and Brent with the underwater camera. On this particular morning of the two-week exercise, four whale sharks are tagged with one miss. February is the month when most whale sharks are spotted in the area.

“There are many reasons for tagging the whale shark, such as mapping out their movements, determining if there is any relationship between different groups of sharks in the Caribbean, the United States and other parts of the world and if there is a genetic interaction around the world.”

All this information helps with pushing for stricter international policies and enforcement of laws. The ocean today is more unsafe than in the past, mostly due to the heavy ocean traffic on the high seas. There is increasing evidence that a lot of animals die from hits by the ships. The ships also interference with acoustics in the sea, disorienting many sea creatures like the whales.

“Each satellite tag costs $5,000. They will enable us to get DNA samples to see if we are sharing populations worldwide,” explains Volker. “For example, it would enable us to know if the mother is from Belize and the offsping is in the Indian Ocean. It would prove that they are highly migratory. It would also call for countries to work together to save the whale sharks and other creatures.”

Hemingways in Watamu donated 15 tags and the Hubbs Institute donated four this year.

Volker shows me the tag and the spear gun that he has improvised.

“This is a pneumatic spear gun,” he explains. “Last year, l used a Hawaian spear gun but it was not strong enough and the tags just bounced off the shark or the shaft got stuck in the skin, leaving the shark swimming around with the spear.”

Incidentally, the whale shark has literally the thickest skin of all creatures, almost four inches.

“This four-inch shaft penetrates the skin and bounces out, leaving the tag in. What I have done is fit a spring between the shaft and the spear.”

This simple bit of technology ensures that the shaft fits the tag inside the skin and the spear bounces out.

The satellites tags will float to the surface in a year’s time and for two weeks, will transmit data to the computers.

“It means we will know all the information about the shark when the tag is emitted from the whale shark’s skin in a year,” explains Brent. “Then the transmission from the tag floating in the ocean to the skies and back to land can happen.”