8 Feb, Tues

Tues, 8 Feb. this was an interesting day. ... a day of 'conflict and confrontation' ... two of my most avoided scenarios. the Whale Shark Oceanic Research Center (WSORC) is one of the places i was checking into volunteering with, but i stopped getting emails from them, i eventuallly signed up with BICA and am very happy to be here. the other day, i got a response to an old email from Lisa at WSORC ... they've been without a director and so have been closed. they said they could use me if i wanted to volunteer. i sent an email saying i was here on Utila with BICA, but would stop in to say 'hi'. our boat is being fixed this week, so we had no scheduled activities, just our regular projects to work on. i wanted to meet Lisa, introduce myself, and see what they were doing; so Abi and i stopped at the WSORC office. Lisa was very happy to see us, said she had talked with Trish (our director) about BICA volunteers helping them out, coz they have none. Lisa was leaving in the morning and needed someone to take charge of their Whale Shark Encounter trip tomorrow. yeahhh, maybe we'll get to snorkel with a Whale Shark! we returned home, so excited; but it was short-lived. we found out a meeting had been scheduled and we would not be available to help them out. hummmmmmm..... i felt terrible to leave Lisa without help when we told her we would be there. a lot of discussion followed. we finally came to the agreement that the meeting would be moved up, so we would help them out; but in the future we should follow proper procedure. we did not mean to do anything wrong, we were just trying to help where we could. at 7pm we went to the Whale Shark presentation at WSORC. great informative presentation .... what an awesome creature! Whale Sharks 101: they are not whales, they are not mammals, ....they are fish. they are in the same family as the Nurse Sharks, .... the ones that have no teeth and suck their food in. they do have 300 rows of tiny tiny teeth, but their throat is the size of your fist, (no chance they're going to eat you), even though their mouths open to 5ft wide. (which i'll admit might be a bit intimidating). they suck in their food with water, then expel the water out of their 5 gill slits on either side. very little is known about them, it was only recently when they were classified as a fish, when a harpooned one was dissected and found to have about 300 eggs and 15 babies ready to be born inside her. they are born alive, up to 2ft long, and the mother has no further responsibility for them. they live deep down in the ocean (2,300ft), migrate, traveling the seas, coming to the surface to feed on tiny fishes and plankton. they grow to 40ft long and 23ft around, and are thought to live to be 70-100yrs old, with sexual maturity around the age of 30. they are still hunted and killed in some Asian countries for their fins, which are a status symbol. they also use their liver for waterproofing. their meat is tasteless and is discarded. education is necessary to inform that they are worth more alive (for the tourist industry) than dead. but unfortunately, cultural traditions have no logic and die slowly. :(. they are generally very acceptable of humans 'invading their space', as long as there isn't splashing or loud noise. each and every Whale Shark has a unique 'finger print' in the design of spots on their left side just before their dorsal fin. the same technology that NASA uses to map constellations is being used to 'connect the dots' of the Whale Shark for identification purposes. there is a whole data base available through ECOCEAN that you can upload photos to ... maybe i'll be able to do this! there is a great YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO2k-l4yRz8&feature=related i wish and hope that before i leave this could be me! i originally became obsessed with the Whale Sharks while i was in Australia. they were just arriving in the area, i had one day scheduled, but none were sited. i've wanted to snorkel with one every since ... that's been 11 years ago! this could be my magic year!