Ningaloo's skittish whale sharks return despite tourists

HOW do whale sharks respond to people getting up close and personal with them?

whale shark

AFTER years of swimming with whale sharks on Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef, Mark Meekan got to wondering: how did these gentle giants really respond to people getting up close and personal with them?

Were they more or less likely to come back to a spot teeming with tourists, as Ningaloo is during the whale shark season?

Would the creatures shy away having had snorkellers swim up to them in the crystalline waters?

Now, after five years of research, Dr Meekan has some answers. "We found there was no difference between the sharks that regularly encountered tourists in the water, and those that only interacted occasionally with them," he said. "There was no evidence that the presence of people affected them one way or the other."

The study will allay fears that already endangered whale sharks are being "loved to death" on Ningaloo, off Exmouth, 1200km north of Perth, where a $6 million ecotourism industry has sprouted around them, attracting more than 17,000 visitors annually.

A principal research scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Dr Meekan has been studying the sharks for more than a decade.

Curiously, those that turn up at Ningaloo between April and July to feast on plankton and krill are relative minnows, juvenile sharks of between 4m and 8m that still have a lot of growing to do.

When mature, whale sharks can measure 18m; they roam the deep sea, and are rarely seen. The concern at Ningaloo was that the proximity of snorkellers would disrupt the young sharks' feeding and resting patterns.

Typically, the creatures spend most of their time 60m below, hoovering up food from low-lying outcrops of the pristine reef.

They surface for spells of about 20 minutes -- scientists believe it's their equivalent of downtime -- especially at sundown.

"They all seem to have a cocktail hour at dusk," Dr Meekan said. "For some reason, it's when most of them will come to the surface. Exactly why they should do that, we don't really know."

The study, which began in 2007 with funding from oil and gas producer Apache Energy, roped in commercial video shot by tourist boat crews of their customers swimming with sharks.

From that archive, Dr Meekan and lead-author Rob Sanzogni, of the the University of Western Australia and AIMS, were able to identify 800 "serial returnee" sharks from their distinctive striping and track their coming and going each year from the reef.

They found that sharks that turned up, say, at the beginning of the feeding season and stayed on to the end were just as likely to return the following year as those that arrived late and had less contact with snorkellers.

While whale sharks are as skittish as kittens -- the merest touch of a human hand on their leathery hide is enough to send them diving for the deep, despite their bulk -- Dr Meekan concluded they happily co-existed with people on Ningaloo, provided tourists and boats operators abided by the rules.

Under West Australian law, snorkellers cannot approach within 3m of a shark's head or 4m of its tail, and boats must keep a distance of at least 30m.

Flash photography in the water is banned.

The result was a "win-win" in terms of protecting the sharks and allowing people the magical experience of swimming with them, Dr Meekan said.

"If we could replicate Ningaloo in the Indonesian archipelago and other places where the sharks are hunted, the future of the species would be assured," he told The Weekend Australian.

Asked whether his research also made a case for relaxing the existing access restrictions to the sharks at Ningaloo, Dr Meekan replied: "Why would you kill the goose that lays the golden egg?"