I read a whale shark article or watch a video clip at least once a day because I'm slightly obsessed, so I'll start collecting the useful or interesting ones below:
Whale sharks who live or aggregate in the gulf coast may have suffocated because oil from the BP spill clogged their gills or been poisoned because their food source has been contaminated. Scientists don't know where the oil dispersed but whale sharks are found all over the water column. Whale sharks are being sighted other places in the gulf possibly because they are displaced. Hopefully tagging methods can track how much the oil spill has affected the health and migration of these animals.
2. Historic (2002-2009) Whale Shark Sighting Locations Shown within the Estimated Boundaries of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Coverage as of July 2, 2010.2010. Map. University of Southern Mississippi. Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, 2010. Web. 19 Feb. 2011. .
3. Whale Sharks: Memory Test - Smart Sharks - Swimming with Roboshark - BBC. Nar. Sir David Attenborough. YouTube. BBC Earth, 12 Jan. 2010. Web. 17 Feb. 2011. .
In Belize to study whale shark's memory. Each year young males gather at a particular off-shore reef because of snapper spawnig from late afternoon to the full moon. Whale sharks somehow learn where the snappers are and remember the same location to return to each year (unlike salmon that follow a chemical trail).
4. Viajeros Del Pacífico. Dir. Alejandro Balaguer. Prod. Albatros Media. Whale Sharks Featured in Award-winning Documentary following the Work of Tropical Research Institute’s Héctor Guzman. Smithsonian Institution, 17 Feb. 2011. Web. 18 Feb. 2011. .
Héctor M. Guzman les marcan tiburon ballenas en el golfo de panama (el oeste lado del pais) que transmiten una señal exactamente donde el tiburon ballena emerge del oceano. Fueron tiburon ballens que volvieron a la costa de Costa Rica, Nicaragua, y Mexico.
5. Wiley-Blackwell. "Whale sharks use geometry to avoid sinking." ScienceDaily 27 November 2010. 19 February 2011 .
Whale sharks movement. They don't expend energy when descending, only when ascending ("negative buoyancy"). Helps save energy when swimming long distances.
How has the information you found helped with your interests in ecotourism? After spills do these whale sharks relocate or continue to migrate to the same places they would normally or does their memory kick in and help them avoid harmful places.
ReplyDeleteLeah,
ReplyDeletein a sense I'm following up on Misty's queries. That is, you mention at the top of your post that you're sharing "the useful or interesting" sources you've been reading. I'd like to see a sentence or two in each annotation in which you concisely spell out what aspect of the source you consider to be useful and why. You'd be surprised how often one can return to one's own set of sources and not recall, even with some annotation, what it was about the source that piqued your interest enough to feel that it would be useful later. The reason for this phenomenon comes down to the fact that we shift our interests as we follow out research trails, make initial drafts of arguments, and so forth. Four months from now, an article that looked useful today may look puzzling. So, noting for _what_ it could prove useful will itself prove useful to you.
I'm with Mark and Misty on this.
ReplyDeleteAs you develop your topic down the road, you'll be following a track you're only vaguely aware of now, and some of the articles you note here will be just what you're going to need. so make some relevant notes to help later.
The lack of concern for whale sharks/animal life in general comes partly from the emphasis of their differences from us and that they seem to inhabit a different world. How can you get people to care about them and their well being? It seems that many of these resources could provide good information when it comes to their sentience, but also the harm being done to them by humans. When it comes to ecotourism, find ways to intrigue people with their intelligence and beauty and simultaneously instill a concern for their well being.
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