Whale shark research on National Geographic

Georgia Aquarium’s whale shark work from Mexico this summer is featured in a story by Jodi Kendall on the main web page for National Geographic’s new show Great Migrations. Cool!

Seeing the world from a whale shark's point of view

My ECOCEAN colleague Brad Norman has been deploying Crittercam on some whale sharks in Exmouth, Western Australia.  I always wanted to try that; I’m so glad he did it!  The footage is now on National Geographic.  There’s a bit less actual Crittercam footage in the story than I would have liked, but thats just my own anxiousness to see what they see!  My guess is that a lot of it was much like the snippets shown - slowly cruising near the surface. 

I would LOVE to see what they see approaching food patches, or when they see another whale shark, or on one of their mysterious crepuscular dives (might need some supplemental lighting for that one).  Its a great start.

Georgia Aquarium work featuring on Nat Geo

Some of the work being done at Georgia Aquarium is featuring on National Geographic’s Inside Wild blog lately.  Check out some of these:

Manta Ray training - Dennis Christen and other training staff talk about what it takes to train the giant rays

Invasive Lionfish - biologist Heather Dziedzic discusses the spread of the beautiful but destructive lionfish throughout the Atlantic states and Caribbean

Giant Pacific Octopus - features a nice photo of the aquarium’s octopus

Also, check out this recent news story about how whale sharks feed, which is based on the same paper I referred to in a previous post.