Gemma’s Shark…. A late addition for 2009

Over the last few weeks or so we have had a number of reports of a juvenile whale shark appearing around the Bay Ternay - Matoopa point area of the North West of Mahe… this isn’t unsusal as we often have a few stragglers hanging around and this little shark seems to like the area.

Despite the reports, the shark was elusive and no-one seemed to have managed to get photographs until the 25th of November when Gemma Jennings, a staff member from GVI, encountered it at around 2.30pm off Anse Major, near to Bay Ternay where the Mahe GVI team are based.


Having heard David’s talks to the volunteers at GVI, Gemma was keen to do her bit and managed to get the right hand side image to run the photo identification programme on. Just coincidentally David was coming onto base later that week to give a talk to the volunteers about whale sharks and so was able to collect the images to run them against the current database.

And…. Gemma’s shark is a new one to the Seychelles catalogue and now has the identity of sey.2009.050 which was in fact the 47th new shark for 2009 bringing the total of sharks identified in 2009 to 89 individuals.


There’s still a few weeks of 2009 to go and so there may yet be some more late additions… maybe a Christmas Shark?