A few days ago, a whale shark cruised by in Dauin, between the Masaplod and Pyramids dive sites and our lucky Atmosphere Resort guests got to swim with the shark and took some photos.
Did you know that every whale shark has a different pattern of stripes and dots? This is just like a human fingerprint. We can use these patterns to identify individual whale sharks by taking a specific photo of the left side of the whale shark from the gills to the dorsal fin and uploading it to Ecocean, www.whaleshark.org.
Ecocean can use the identification picture to see if the shark has been seen before and if it hasn’t, they give it a unique identification number.
Luckily, a few of the photos taken did show the shark’s left side and we used this one to try and identify it. It turns our whale shark from April 5th was never identified before, so it is now named P-660 in the Ecocean database, the 660th whale shark identified in the Philippines! If it is ever identified again, we will receive an e-mail from Ecocean about its whereabouts and we will definitely share with you where it has travelled.
http://www.whaleshark.org/individuals.jsp?number=P-660
Your marine biologist /Daniel
