Wow doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun! Certainly the season seems to be zipping along now despite being punctuated by several days of grotty weather when we couldn’t get the microlight aircraft up. Having said that Johan and Neil our pilots have been doing a sterling job of dodging between the showers to give us the aerial support we need.
Its inter-phase time at the Global Vision International project and so we get to do the weekly plankton tows at grouper point which was a great way of passing a rainy morning and several hours of fun for the interns.... who managed to sport a remarkable range of unusual rain-wear! GVI don’t need to worry about the plankton recovery record although Gareth is beginning to catch up on Luke Riley’s long standing record.
Sherry & Jenny braving the rain during the plankton tow... jenny has been banned from wearing polka dots again!
We have had some interesting days in monitoring as well we a lot of new whale sharks appearing, several at the small end of the scale for us at around 3.5 metres.
One of the new small sharks, accompanied by some black & white pilots as well as a bunch of remoras, photo Ciara
We also had a whale shark with a very unusual injury which we suspect might be a bite mark from another ‘toothy’ type of shark; it is a complete oval whole just before the first gill slit on the right side of the shark. What’s a bit worrying is that it appears to be quite fresh so whatever caused it might still be around!
The shark with the unusual injury, possibly from a shark bite? Photo Gareth
Hopefully there will be a few posts from the interns over the coming few days, when they’re not too busy writing up encounter sheets!
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