The last few weeks have been pretty busy with other field projects and travel but also with some exciting developments on the Keny whale shark tagging project. I dragged into San Diego on 4 March after two long days of travel home from Mombasa. Two days later I headed out to San Nicolas Island and then San Miguel Island in Southern California waters to count northern elephant seal pups and then tag a couple thousand weaned pups to finish off the 2008 breeding season studies. San Nicolas Island is a U.S. Naval outlying landing field and tracking station and San Miguel Island is just north about 60 miles and is one of the five islands in the Channel Islands National Park. It was a wonderful expedition with some incredibly fine weather and also some not so fine weather with strong winds and pelting sand. After coming back home from those trips on 18 March I headed back east on 21 March with Dr. Pamela Yochem, HSWRI Senior Research Biologist and Executive Vice President, to participate in a panel on careers with animals and conservation at the annual National Science Teachers Association meeting in Boston, Massachussetts. Just got back home late last night and now will have some time in the office this week at least to catch up on reports and accumulated things.
But just as I was returning from Kenya, two pop-up satellite transmitters appeared just north of Kenya, drifted for a little bit and then looked like they got stranded on the coastal reef or perhaps on the beach. I started sending the geographic coordinates of those tags to Nimu Njonjo and Volker Bassen at Diani Beach, hoping that we might be able to recover the tags, download all of the stored data, and then rehabilitate the tags for additional deployment next season. One of those tags was one that we attached to a whale shark off Diani Beach in February 2007, so we are waiting to learn all of the stored secrets on where that shark had travelled during the past year. The other tag we had just attached to a whale shark off Diani Beach in mid-Februray this year. It may have detached because the shark had spent several days at a relatively constant depth, a programmed release feature of the tag. Nimu and Volker sent David French and Simon Wanjonah up to the northern Mombasa coast for a search and recovery mission....they had quite and adventure with this but found both tags (!) and they have now arrived to San Diego where I am preparing to send them to Microwave Telemetry for data recovery and rehabilitation. Simon describes their beachcombing adventures at http://whalesharks.wildlifedirect.org/
Until next time,
bs
Dr. Stewart boarding a gyrocopter in search of whale sharks
Brent Stewart, Ph.D., J.D.
Brent Stewart joined HSWRI as a field biologist in 1977 and has since conducted studies of the population biology, foraging and physiological ecology, and behavior of a variety of marine mammals, sea birds, sea turtles, and sharks. Dr. Stewart’s research expeditions have ranged from Greenland and Iceland in the North Atlantic south to Marion Island in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, in Russia's Lake Baikal, from the Beaufort and Bering Seas south through temperate, tropical and equatorial waters in the North Pacific Ocean, and in the Weddell, Amundsen, and Ross Seas of the Antarctic's Southern Ocean. For Brent's complete bio click here.
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