BRAD NORMAN, AUSTRALIA:
STUDY AND PROTECT THE OCEANS’ LARGEST FISH, THE WHALE SHARK
Up until the 1990s, whale sharks ‒ the biggest fish in the oceans ‒ were a largely unknown species, with barely 350 encounters recorded worldwide. Today, thanks significantly to the efforts of diver and marine biologist Brad Norman, there have been more than 75,000 documented sightings, covering 12,000 individual animals, assembled by a global team of 9,000 citizen scientists and researchers.
Norman’s initiative is one of the largest marinebased citizen science projects in the world. It has contributed immeasurably to knowledge of this once cryptic creature and to its conservation, turning it into a flagship species for monitoring the health of the world’s oceans and the human impact on them.
The key to this remarkable achievement was a novel, non-invasive system for wildlife recognition, which employs an algorithm adapted from that in the Hubble Space Telescope to identify each whale shark from the star-like pattern of white spots on its skin. Any underwater swimmer with a camera can now photograph a whale shark and log it on www.whaleshark.org for identification. This database enables researchers to track individual sharks throughout their global range and monitor their seasonal migration patterns.
“We study natural shark behaviour without humans and then compare it with what they do when humans are present,” the 2006 Rolex Awards for Enterprise recipient explains. “The aim is to refine management guidelines to minimise any impact of ecotourism on the sharks, which we plan to share with conservation and tourism bodies around the world.”
Having prepared the species assessment reports for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List that resulted in the whale shark’s status being listed first as vulnerable, then upgraded to endangered in 2016, Norman contributed to efforts aimed at banning world trade in whale shark products under the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and helped develop the UN’s Memorandum of Understanding for the protection of endangered migratory sharks.
In one of the world’s most adventurous citizen science projects, he engaged school children in the Whale Shark Race Around the World, where 12 young whale sharks were equipped with satellite tags to report their travels. In tandem with the shark race was an eight-week course in marine science aimed to help students appreciate the wonder of the oceans ‒ what is in them, what they mean to us ‒ and their vulnerability to human impacts.