The quiet time has given us time to get into the field to collect more acoustic receivers that have been deployed since June but we still have even more to collect and keep us busy.

Four of the satellite tags we deployed in July popped off after each one making a full six month deployment and sending us lots of interesting and valuable data.
This month I made a trip to Mafia Island in Tanzania to meet up with the research team studying the whale sharks there. I spent 10 days with the team and sharks and not only had a great time but a great experience too.

February and March should see the waters start to warm again and hopefully the return of the whale sharks. Our new acoustic array will be able to tell us exactly when the sharks start to return.

David

December has been relatively quiet for whale shark activity compared to the summer months, although there are still a few sharks around in the Musandam region and only yesterday there was a report from Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE which is unusual.

As December brought some quiet time with it, we decided to take the opportunity to retrieve some of the 15 acoustic receivers we deployed in the field in May during our first Qatar whale shark expedition. We had a few teething problems at first working out how to activate the releases and dealing with battery problems, but, we soon got the hang of it and managed to retrieve six of our receivers.

Because the waters are deep in Qatar we have to deploy with an acoustic release, which attaches to the receiver and releases it from an anchor; we can’t do it with a diver like on some other projects as we have no shallow water in the area. The receivers were extremely bio-fouled and the floats had been more affected by the water pressure than we anticipated but everything worked out OK in the end.

The data the receivers had collected was incredible with over 4500 transmissions received from the sharks we tagged with acoustic tags. The data is taking a little sorting through but all in all the acoustic array worked perfectly and we still have another seven receivers to retrieve from the field!

January will be a very exciting month too as many of our satellite tags are scheduled to pop off and we will be back in the field to retrieve the rest of the acoustic receivers and find out what the sharks were up to whilst they were in Qatar waters.

Happy New Year to everyone and all the best for 2013

David

The region has become much cooler now as winter sets in and in-turn, the water temps in the Gulf and Gulf of Oman have started to drop rapidly; with this change, the whale sharks seem to have moved on, especially from Qatar.

One of the aims of the 2012 season was to find out where the sharks go when they disperse from Qatari waters in the winter months. On November 23rd we had a satellite tag scheduled to pop off at 11am. This tag was a new MK10-F that has the capability to collect GPS positioning as well as the normal light level location data, it also builds a time series of the whale sharks movements, collecting depth and temperature readings every 10 minutes throughout the deployment period. This tag was deployed on an 8m male on May 27th and we programmed it for a six-month deployment. Six months is a long time for a satellite tag to be attached to a whale shark. Once the tag is on, anything can happen to it. A longer deployment period allows a longer time for bio-foul such as algae and barnacles to attach to the tag, which can not only affect the tags performance but can also cause it to sink after it detaches, so the tag may never get a chance to transmit its ‘payload’.

The MK10-F is a towed archival tag that is attached to the shark on a long 1-2m tether, the idea is that if the shark slows for a long enough period of time, the tag will float to the surface and collect a GPS position, this is a lot more accurate than the normal light level location collected by archival tags than can have an error radius of up to 35km.

We decided to take a chance with two of our MK10-F tags and programmed them for a full six-month deployment, in the full knowledge that it was a risk. As the scheduled detachment date of November 23rd came around, we received no information from the tag. November 24th came and went and still the tag did not transmit any data. However, when I awoke on November 25th, I had transmissions! The tag had actually taken over 240 minutes to burn through the metal pin attaching it to the shark, this is much longer than other tags I have worked with (usually about 11 minutes). By the time the tag reached the surface, it had missed the passing satellites from the region, which usually pass by in the evening. So, on November 24th in the late evening (after I was fast asleep) the tag communicated with a satellite and started to transmit a full six-month deployment back to us.

The tag is still transmitting data today as it can take up to 14 days to transmit the information back to us. The tag tries to transmit as much data as possible before the battery fails. We have one more MK10-F that is scheduled to pop off in January, the good news about this shark and tag is that we encountered her still proudly wearing her tag in a feeding aggregation on September 29th, so we know this tag is still doing OK. We hope that we have the same success with this tag as a full winter deployment may answer our question of where the sharks go in the cooler months; fingers crossed…

This season we managed to get into the field a few times in September and gather some important information regarding the aggregations which is building nicely on the 2011 season. As we learn more and more about the sharks we are able to better predict when and where they will occur which is increasing the efficiency of our data collection.

October 8th-11th saw the first regional shark conservation workshop, which was held in Dubai. Shark scientists from around the world and regional government representatives gathered to discuss local shark issues. We were invited to give a talk on the whale shark research project, which went down very well with the attendees and sparked much interest in our regional whale sharks.

Outside of Qatar whale sharks have been few in number. October/November is usually a good time to encounter whale sharks in the Musandam and other regions of Oman. We did receive a few encounters though from divers, with one dive group reporting a huge estimated 10m whale shark from the Musandam. I am predicting encounters to be on the increase through November but we will have to wait and see.

The weather has changed dramatically since late September and throughout October, with air temperatures dropping by 10 degrees and coastal water temperatures starting to slowly reduce too. As the Gulf environment enters the winter months it is hard to predict what will happen to the whale shark encounters, but, we have a few satellite tags that are due to stay on until January and so hopefully this year we will find out exactly what the sharks do in the colder months; fingers crossed.

September also saw the first aerial whale shark survey in the Gulf. The Qatar Ministry of Environment in collaboration with the Qatar Air Force and Maersk Oil set off to test out the rescue helicopter and its suitability for monitoring the offshore population. As it was past the ‘end of the season’ they were not expecting to see any sharks but instead, they encountered an aggregation of an estimated 50 sharks, all feeding in close proximity. These images are the first to show the density of the aggregations we are working with and the size variation of the animals. We are hoping to continue aerial surveys next season to help us monitor the number of sharks seen in the larger aggregations of June and July.

Following on from last month’s images of whale shark injuries and scars, Steffen Bach, part of the research team from Maersk Oil came across this shark, which had lost its entire dorsal fin. How it happened is anybody’s guess but it can safely be speculated that the injury is anthropogenic in origin.

Outside of Qatar, whale shark sightings have been coming in from the Omani coast with the Damaniyat Islands being a hot spot in September. Dive centres are reporting seeing five whale sharks at a time on some days!

As September comes to a close I am expecting to see a reduction in whale shark encounters in Qatar. I am really hoping that our sat tags stay on for at least part of the winter so that we can see where the sharks go when they leave Qatari waters. October is usually a good month for encounters in Oman, so we will have to just wait and see what this year brings.

Lumpy head was first observed in June of this year and has suffered a severe impact trauma at some point in her life causing her head to be in a constantly raised position and loss of her dorsal fin. She is a 4m female and we have observed her at several aggregations feeding happily.

Another loveable character that I blogged about last year is ‘Scarface’ we first observed him briefly in July 2011 but we were so happy to see him again this year looking healthy and we got some amazing comparative photographs of the injury and how well it is healing.

We also noted a couple of sharks this year with rope attached to their tails in what seems like a fishing attempt. This is almost certainly not happening locally and we hope to expand on this as our satellite tags pop off later in this year and we can see where the sharks travel to in the winter months.

We are not yet sure if these traumas are happening locally or beyond but to date, not many fresh scars have been seen. To identify anthropogenic and natural threats to the whale sharks of Qatar is part of our aims. The cover image is of a whale shark with a distinct shark bite out of its fin, I am hoping this didn’t happen locally!

Our research trips were very limited in August due to the extreme temperatures and logistics this brings along with it. The oil platform workers did keep their eyes open though and reported sharks whenever they saw them. Although the sharks returned towards the end of August, the numbers of sharks were less than July and decreased towards the end of August, which follows the same pattern as last year.

Another match was between a shark seen feeding in Qatari waters by myself in July 2011 and this same shark appeared again on 20th July in Musandam. These movements and re-sights using simple spot pattern analysis are helping to build up a picture of the Arabian whale shark story.

Fieldwork in Qatar has been very successful so far this year and we have seen sharks on almost every trip. On a research visit on July 13th and 14th, we had two consecutive days swimming with a large aggregation of around 100 whale sharks that were feeding in the area. The sun was very hot but the wind was low which allowed us to deploy satellite, tags, acoustic tags and also to collect many tissue samples from the sharks for analysis.

I am hoping to get a further research trip to Qatar in August after the Eid celebrations have finished. Hopefully the sharks will still be in the area, as last year sightings started to decline within the Gulf in early September.

Unfortunately, one of the SOSF tags that we deployed on an adult male whale shark came off after being attached for just 41 days. The tag had pulled out of the shark by the anchor and floated to the surface, which means it probably became snagged on something. Then, after 8 consecutive days at a constant depth (surface), triggered an early release. The tag transmitted data back for seven days and I received a lot of information about the sharks movements and, depth and temperature profiles. The tag surfaced north of mainland Qatar and drifted very close to shore, we tried to find it but were unsuccessful, but as it was so close to the coast, I am hoping that someone will find it and give me a call.

The second half of our expedition was extremely exciting. We returned to the field from Doha port once the weather gave us a break. The wind and subsequent wavers were both too high to get in the water on the day we returned, so we decided to utilize the time by deploying our new acoustic array. We deployed 15 acoustic receivers around the study area which took us most of the day. The receivers are deployed in 60m of water and so we needed to attach floats and acoustic releases (which can be activated from a boat) to each receiver so that we can retrieve them later in the year when the whale shark season ends.

The acoustic release deployment took up much of the day and due to the high winds we didn’t see or receive any reports about whale sharks in the area. On the Friday morning, we received a report from one of the platforms that they were seeing large numbers of whale sharks in the area and so we headed over. Upon reaching the location there were indeed many whale sharks aggregating just like the time before. Once in the water we managed to deploy three further MK10-Fs and many more acoustic tags. We also took SPOT IDs, and laser measurements from all the sharks encountered and as many tissue samples as possible. The wind was still relatively strong on this morning and the waves were high which meant that we had to work a lot harder than on day 1. By 13:30 and four hours in the water, the captain called us in as the waves were getting too high and the wind was quickly picking up. We managed to sneak in a quick feeding plankton sample from the rib before getting back on the research boat.

We then headed back towards the mainland as the wind was forecast to reach 40 knots over night. The wind certainly picked up and we were all glad the captain brought us back, as even close to shore the wind was strong and the waves were extremely high. We utilised the time well by analysing our collected data and setting up more equipment for our return into the field.

The wind stayed high for two days and then started to drop. The forecast gave us two flat calm days at the end of the expedition but the whale sharks were nowhere to be found. The GPS capable tags showed the sharks south-east of the study area, could the storm have caused them to move away? Even though we didn’t encounter any more sharks on our trip, we had two amazing days with large aggregations, deployed lots of tags and collected a lot of vital information about the sharks we encountered to build on the information collected last season. It was a fantastic trip enjoyed by all…

May began with our first research trip into the Musandam region of Oman. We spent the day dive surveying on a boat kindly provided by Nomad Ocean Adventures. We conducted three dive surveys at dive sites known to be frequented by whale sharks, as well as plankton sampling and collecting environmental data. Unfortunately we didn’t encounter any Musandam whale sharks on our dives but the information we collected was very useful.

After an influx of sightings in late April, I have had no reports of whale sharks in the Musandam in May, which should be one of the best months of the year to encounter them in this area. Sightings from Qatar began in mid May which was a great relief with our impending expedition…

On 26th May, Katie Brooks, Dr Simon Pierce and I headed out on a two-week whale shark research expedition offshore of Qatar to the Al Shaheen gas field where I have been researching the whale sharks that aggregate in this very special area. The expedition is supported by Maersk Oil who have taken care of all of the logistics including providing us with the use of the Topaz Salalah as a research vessel for the duration of the expedition. Accompanied by researchers from the Qatar Ministry of Environment and Maersk Oil, we are now half way through the expedition and, despite a few (mostly weather based) issues it has been a very exciting first week.

Our first day in the field was very fruitful and we encountered a large aggregation of whale sharks actively ram feeding at the surface. We estimated that there were approximately 70+ sharks feeding in the immediate vicinity and have already added 60 new identities to our database and have resighted 10 individuals previously seen in the area.

Whilst swimming with these sharks we managed to deploy two MK10 PAT tags that were provided with funding from the Save Our Seas foundation, one MiniPAT and one new MK10-F GPS capable tag both provided by Maersk Oil. The SOS tags were set for a full deployment of 365 days so we will all have to wait to see what happens with them. We also managed to deploy six of our new acoustic tags, take many tissue samples to be used for stable isotope and further genetic analysis and successfully sized many sharks with a new laser sizing set up that was designed by Dr Pierce himself.

Since this bonanza, the wind has picked up and sightings of whale sharks have been infrequent and we even had to return to Doha port for one day due to the high winds. Today the wind gave us a much needed break and we have encountered pods of common and spinner dolphins, many sea snakes and were treated to a few whale sharks at the end of the day…

We will also be starting Qatar field surveys in May. I am excited at the prospect of being back in the field and swimming with the whale sharks again. The Qatar season seems to be shorter than the Gulf of Oman season and still no sharks have been spotted in our Qatar study area, but I have confidence that with the reappearance of the Oman and UAE sharks, Qatar won’t be too far behind.

We have been working hard preparing for this season’s fieldwork and I am hoping this will prove to be another successful season where we learn more about the Arabian Gulf whale sharks.

David