{"id":6209,"date":"2019-05-10T16:40:22","date_gmt":"2019-05-10T13:40:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.madagascarwhalesharks.org\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2019-05-10T16:40:22","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T13:40:22","slug":"final-results-from-the-2018-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/final-results-from-the-2018-season\/","title":{"rendered":"Final results from the 2018 season"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

While the first whale sharks are already flaunting around the Nosy Be area and I am fully preparing for this year\u2019s promising season, it\u2019s time to take a final look back at last year\u2019s results. And what a year it was! Our third official season in the field was a season of coming to age for the project: we were able to expand our field research with some amazing results and we started our educational program for local youth of Nosy Be, which I am very passionate about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Michel and the boys<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In terms of whale sharks it was a rather\nunusual season. The bulk of them arrived relatively late to Nosy Be, at the\nbeginning of October. There was another peak of high activity at the end of\nNovember. And in between those peaks whale shark sightings were rare with a two\nweek period in the beginning of November, where the average shark per day\ndropped to 1.08 (instead of 3.4). We even thought the whale sharks had already\ngone!
\nWe identified 140 individual whale sharks last year in the area. 90% of them\nwere males, between 3 to 7 meters long as every year. Just like previous years\nwe saw MD-151 (he prefers to be called Michel though) the most -on 22 days- and\nthree of his friends were also spotted frequently. Female sightings are still\nrare, with only 3 known females returning since 2015. This brings the total 322\ndifferent whale sharks identified since 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

51 out of 140 identified individuals returned\nto Nosy Be last year, all the others were new. Still none of all the Nosy Be\nsharks have been identified elsewhere in the region, or in the world, despite ongoing\ndata collection in surrounding countries. We are currently investigating their\nmovement patterns to establish whether most of the whale sharks are temporary\nvisitors or residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Passport to the future<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I am most excited about is our educational program, now known as Les Guardiens de L\u2019Oc\u00e9an (The Guardians of the Oceans), a partnership with local partner NGO MADA Megafauna<\/a>. Bruno, a local from Nosy Be, has been heading to two schools to talk to children aged 8-12 about whale sharks. Also, every Saturday kids were gathering on the beach for fun and eco-friendly activities with Bruno. Thanks to a successful crowdsourcing project (thank you so much!), we are able to expend this project to other schools on the island. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m happy to say that the code of conduct we implemented in 2017, available in 3 languages, has been adopted by most operators throughout the area, which is a great step. Yet each year it is a growing worry for us as tourism is steeply rising so we are busy working on implementing the code of conduct at the next level, more on this soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All tourists on board of both our partner operator Baleines Rand\u2019eau<\/a> and Safari Baleine<\/a> boats have received a briefing on how to interact with the most beautiful animal in the world (I\u2019m biased). We have been collecting socio-economic data from tourists and are busy processing these at the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a few weeks, I am heading to Australia to present our results at the Fifth International Whale Shark Conference<\/a>. I\u2019m so excited for the chance to meet the world\u2019s whale shark experts and tell them about our work, the last conference was in mid-2016 !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the meantime we are also busy preparing for the upcoming season, if you’d like to join as a volunteer check out the eligibility criterias here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the first whale sharks are already flaunting around the Nosy Be area and I am fully preparing for this year\u2019s promising season, it\u2019s time to take a final look back at last year\u2019s results. And what a year it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":6252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madawhalesharks.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}