Education
ECOCEAN carries out various educational outreach activities in Australia and overseas to promote community awareness of the need to protect and conserve whale sharks and their marine environment
THE ECOCEAN WHALE SHARK RACE AROUND THE WORLD
This innovative educational program was a collaboration between ECOCEAN and the Western Australian Department of Education. Schools across WA sponsored satellite tags that were deployed on whale sharks at Ningaloo Reef. Students from kindy right up to Year 12 watched the movements of their sharks on a website and participated in innovative learning activities specially designed for the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) curriculum.
The Race produced outstanding results, helping ECOCEAN researchers to better understand the movement patterns of whale sharks from Ningaloo and along the western Australian coastline.
The data collected were used in many of our scientific publications
CITIZEN SCIENCE
Citizen science is the involvement of people from the community in scientific research — contributing observations, photographs, data or other information that helps scientists better understand and protect the natural world. By involving people across different places and over long periods of time, citizen science allows researchers to collect far more information than they could alone. These contributions can build large and valuable datasets, helping scientists track wildlife, identify changes over time, answer important research questions and support conservation.
Citizen science also connects people directly with research, giving everyone the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to understanding and protecting our natural world. The ECOCEAN citizen science program allows any member of the community to be involved in collecting important identification data on whale sharks. Citizen scientists across the world can take a photo of the spot patterns on the skin of a whale shark and enter the photo into Sharkbook: Wildbook for Whale Sharks (previously known as the ECOCEAN Whale Shark Photo-identification Library). Photos are used to identify the whale shark and determine if it has been seen in the same area (or elsewhere) before.
MEET STUMPY
Meet ‘Stumpy’ and his friends – some of the regular visitors to Ningaloo. Stumpy was first seen in 1995 and was the first shark entered in the ECOCEAN Whale Shark Photo-identification Library (now Sharkbook: Wildbook for Whale Sharks) with the code name A-001. He continues to return to Ningaloo on a regular basis, with sightings almost every year since. He even has a scientific paper written about him and his friend ‘Zorro’ (A-041). Click on the links below to take you to Sharkbook to see what these whale sharks have been up to!
VOLUNTEER
ECOCEAN relies heavily on volunteers to help with our work. We encourage people with a keen interest in the marine environment to contribute to our core objectives of research, education and conservation.
For more information, please contact us.
Stumpy was named after his distinguishing feature, his ‘stumpy’ tail