Whale Sharks

Still on Utila island. We're here to film Whale Sharks. They aren't cooperating. Must have not gotten the memo, "Filming with Breakwater Entertainment, Monday". Whale Sharks are the largest fish in the sea, as much as sixty feet long. They're a deep blue with white dots and stripes. They were thought rare, even Cousteau saw only two in his entire career. It turns out to be more of a case of looking in the wrong place. Utila is the right place.
There is a cool grassroots protection movement of the Whale Sharks here. They are taged and tracked here and in Mexico. To indentify them a picture is taken of the side behind the gills. Here there is a distinctive pattern of dots. A computer program that NASA design to recognize patterns of stars, draws triangles between the dots that can then be rotated to be compared with other pictures. Anyone can submit a photo. If you've taken a picture of Whale Shark and submit and it's a new Whale Shark you will get updates about your Shark when it is spotted again. If not you get a history where it's been spotted before.

We had a good boat ride looking for them. Oh well.