A new documentary hosted by Jessica Harvey, daughter of renowned ocean conservationist Guy Harvey, is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
“This is Their Ocean: Sea of Life” follows the path of two male whale sharks “Milo” and “Lucho” after they were tagged with a satellite tracking devices last summer near Isla Mujeres. The footage used for the film was part of a larger research project between Mexican marine biologist Rafael de la Parra of the Ch’ooj Ajauil AC and Nova Southeastern University’s Guy Harvey Research Institute.
“Unfortunately, whale sharks are currently on the endangered species list, so revealing their migration behavior allows us to better understand, conserve, monitor and effectively manage shark populations,” said Greg Jacoski, executive director of the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation.
SPOT tag data revealed that the two sharks swam almost a combined 10,000 trek before returning to the waters off Mexico where they were originally tagged. According to an official release from GHRI, Milo’s journey is the longer of the two, first swimming east deep into the Atlantic Ocean past Bermuda and returning near the tagging site in February, 2019. Then Milo took a month-long excursion into the Gulf of Mexico, returning close to the tagging site once again, logging more than 7,000 miles.
Lucho, on the other hand, has had a shorter voyage. He left in late August on a 2,713-mile swim through the waters surrounding the Cayman Islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands before turning around and travelling to the coast of Honduras. From there, he made his way home to the tagging site by Isla Mujeres in late December.
“Tagging these whale sharks on their fins with SPOT tags was a scientific coup,” director of NSU’s GHRI Mahmood Shivji, Ph.D. said. “Rafael did an incredible job getting this done. The direct satellite communicating technology of these SPOT tags provide much more accurate tracks of the shark migrations compared to the traditionally used, data archival satellite tags, which have a lot more positional error associated with them.”
The journey of over 150 sharks, including whale sharks, tigers, makos and oceanic whitetips that have been tagged by GHRI in the last decade can be followed online in near real-time at www.GHRItracking.org