Whale Sharks: The Giants of Ningaloo Reef

This work gives an insight into the habits and personality of the whale shark, a creature virtually unknown to science until a few years ago. This book was awarded joint Best Popular Natural History Book of 1995 by the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales.

The book is the story of the discovery of Ningaloo’s whale sharks. It is the story of a quest to discover more about one of the world’s most elusive creatures. It is a story of setbacks and triumphs that eventually led to Exmouth, Western Australia, being the Whale Shark tourism capital of the world. It is also the story of Ningaloo Reef and the whales, dolphins, dugongs sharks, and all the other incredible creatures that reside there.

Whale Sharks are the largest shark and the largest fish in the sea. Growing to a length of over 12 metres, the sighting of a whale shark has always created great excitement in mariners and divers. For many years they were considered rare and elusive, but now certain hotspots in the world have been identified that have allowed ongoing research which has solved many of the mysteries about the species.

In the early 1980s, Dr Geoff Taylor was the first person to document, study and publicise the seasonal aggregations of whale sharks for which Ningaloo Reef is now justifiably famous. His discovery of the presence of these sharks was the basis of an ecotourism industry that provides the chance for anyone capable of donning a mask, snorkel and fins to enter the water and swim with these sharks in their natural environment, an experience that now injects over $20M annually into the regional economy and has been used as a model for the development of similar industries throughout tropical coastal environments. As a result, Geoff is one of the few people in Australia today who can rightfully claim to have founded a global industry.

Geoff was also a pioneer in a second, equally important way, because he recognised that the aggregations at Ningaloo Reef also provided scientists and researchers a window into the biology of animals that otherwise led cryptic lives somewhere out in the depths of the open ocean. Prior to Geoff’s discovery, our knowledge of the ecology of whale sharks was almost completely based on the few animals that had been stranded dead on beaches or rammed and then transported back to ports draped across ship’s bows. For the first time, the aggregations at Ningaloo provided reliable and predictable access to these animals in the wild so that the mysteries of their behaviour and day-to-day lives could begin to be revealed. Geoff set himself upon this task with vigour and vision. He was the first to recognise that the spot and stripe patterns of these sharks were unique to each individual, so that photo-identification libraries could be used to track both movements and demographic changes in populations, an insight that others have now built into a global program. Geoff led the first satellite tagging studies of whale sharks, an approach that many researchers (including myself) have followed and one that has now revealed the residency and movement patterns of whale sharks both at Ningaloo Reef and in the wider region of the Indian Ocean and Coral Triangle. Today, these data are the critical underpinnings of management strategies to ensure the conservation of the species at both national and international scales.

Geoff’s first edition of this book, published in 1994, brought to world-wide attention both the outstanding personal experience and the scientific insights that swimming with a whale shark at Ningaloo could offer.

176 p. : col. ill., maps, port. ; 29 cm. 21/12/21