January 28, 2007 

Today we have inaugural posts for two new blogs. One of them we announced earllier: Matt Potenski's Whale Shark Blog. We are also beginning another blog from Steve Fox and Isabelle Foisy of Utila Whale Shark Research.

Why two blogs about Whale Sharks? We are planning many blogs written by people who work with or advocate for sharks. These are the first two, and perhaps it's just coincidence that they are both about Whale Sharks. It's interesting how the two blogs are from different points of view. Matt Potenski comes to his research as a marine biologist, a scientific researcher, who concentrates on sharks. His work currently takes him to islands off of Tanzania in Africa. Steve Fox and Isabeele Foisy are divers and lay researchers. They come to this out of their love for sharks and healthy oceans. 

There are various shark research programs throughout the world, gaining knowledge about the largely unknown lives of sharks. In both of these programs, the whale sharks are tagged so that location data can be accumulated over time to understand living and migration habits of the Whale Sharks. The tagging methodology that is used by these bloggers is dfferent. Matt uses numbered tags as part of the Shark Research Institute's Operation Whale Shark. Steve and Isabelle are using Ecocean's photo pattern recognition methodology. Ecocean has developed the means to recognize the unique pattern of spots that each Whale Shark has and databases this information for later recognition. Tagging is more common and can be used with species where individual recognition of patterns of spots is not feasible.

We hope you enjoy these and forthcoming blog posts. Let us know what you think.