TRACKING SEA MONSTERS

How a NASA star-mapping tool is being put to a new use - following the largest fish in the sea, whale sharks

- WORDS SARAH CRUDDAS

It's often said that we know more about what's up in space than what's hidden in our oceans. Staggering, when you remember that the surface of the Earth consists of a little over 70 per cent water. Take the whale shark, for example - on average, they're around nine metres in length, but the biggest known adult was over 12 metres long and weighed roughly the same as a typical fire engine. Known as 'tofu sharks' for their taste and texture, these are giants of the ocean, yet our knowledge of them is still small. However, new insights into these creatures is coming from a surprising source - a NASA algorithm originally used to identify stars photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Whale sharks spend much of their time at great depths in the ocean, away from human eyes. They are highly migratory, move far away from our coasts and can dive thousands of metres per day. It means that research into these creatures is expensive and difficult. With the exception of the 1980s and 1990s, when whale sharks became a target for their flesh and fins, generally they are of no economic value, so little has been invested into finding out more about them. We don't understand how they mate, or where they give birth. All that is known about these sharks, which have a similar life span to humans, is the information that's gathered when they're shallow enough and close enough to our shores for us to see in order to gather data. In the past, tagging them to learn more about whale shark migration and behaviour had been the answer. But it hasn't been successful. In fact, according to Jason Holmberg, a director of the Wild Me conservation project: "Physical tags had a less than one per cent success rate."