How small we are

[florida joe]

NAPLES — A resident of Naples for five years, Dale Goble was born and raised in the panhandle city of Destin. Now 53, he has fished the Gulf of Mexico nearly his whole life, even working as a deckhand on a charter boat in his youth.
Also a certified diver, Goble has logged more than 200 dives in the Caribbean. There is little in the sea Goble has not seen.
But during a June 16 fishing trip about 60 miles southwest off Caxambas Pass near the Baja California wreck, the sea showed Goble something new. It was something so large, so wondrous that two weeks later he is still trying to grasp the enormity of the moment.
“I still can’t explain the experience,” Goble said. “It’s like seeing a UFO, just awe-inspiring. I was dumbfounded. Seeing that just heightens the respect I have for the sea and how small we are as people. It was an incredible experience.”
What swallowed Goble’s imagination whole was a whale shark, actually three of them. Growing upward of 45 feet in length and 16 tons, the whale shark is the largest fish in the ocean.
Though only 26, Travis Horton, who was on Goble’s Ole Yeller 26-foot Scout that day along with Goble’s wife, Anita, and stepson, Chris Horton, has seen a lot of things too. He has served three tours in Iraq, the latest ending 10 months ago.
It was the first time in Horton’s life he had been offshore fishing. He thought wrestling with amberjacks was truly something else. He had no idea.
“It blew my mind,” said Horton, now a sergeant with the military police stationed at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Ga. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff, but I’ve never seen anything like that. There’s nothing I could do to prepare for what I saw out there.”
Goble estimates the three whale sharks his party encountered exceeded 30 feet.
“It was an incredible day already,” Goble said. “We killed on the fish already. I was rigging a pole and just happened to look out and saw this huge dorsal fin sticking out of the water.
“'That was no dolphin,’ I said to myself. Then I saw a tail fin 15 feet behind the dorsal. ‘We gotta go check this out,’ I told everybody. I had a real good idea what it was.”
Horton was skeptical.
“When Dale said they were whale sharks I didn’t believe it at first, until we got up close,” Horton said. “It was amazing.”
Despite their size, whale sharks are basically harmless. They belong to the shark species. The “whale” in their name refers mainly to their feeding habits. Whale sharks don’t feed on large animals or fish; they feed off plankton and krill, just like the great whales.
“First off, I saw one, then saw the other two,” Goble said. “We just kind of eased up on them. They weren’t scared of the boat.
“I had my snorkel gear. After 10 minutes, I really wanted to get in the water with them. The only thing that stopped me was the fear of my wife picking me up in the boat. I thought she’d run over me.”
Dr. Robert Hueter, director of the Center of Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, has swam with whale sharks many times. He said Gulf sightings such as Goble’s, though not common, are not rare either and that most occur tens of miles offshore.
According to a survey conducted by the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs, Miss., in 2008 there were 70 reported sightings of whale sharks in the Gulf, the most on record for the region.
Dr. Eric Hoffmayer, a research scientist with GCRL, said there have already been 35 sightings this year. He’s hoping the number tops 100.
“Seeing one is incredible,” Hoffmayer said. “It can be a life-changing experience.”
Hueter, whose parents live in Naples, is currently writing the findings of a six-year study the center has been conducting on whale sharks off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
With so little known about the whale shark, noted for its spotted skin, the results are surprising. According to Hueter, the study reveals the Gulf appears to house the largest aggregation of whale sharks in the world. The giants feed May through September in the Yucatan’s plankton-rich waters just across the Gulf from the Florida coast.

 

[florida joe]

“We’re really not sure of the exact numbers,” Hueter said. “It might be more than 1,000, probably between 1,000 to 1,5000, maybe as many as 3,000 in the summertime.
“We put together, with our Mexican colleagues, a research plan to work on these animals, to tag them and to see where they were going and where they were coming from. They are clearly coming from great distances into the Gulf, and going away great distances, too.
“The animals we are seeing here along the Florida coast are probably part of that big population that is feeding off Mexico in the summer.”
Part of the difficulty in studying whale sharks is their pelagic nature, meaning they are open ocean dwellers, moving all the time. Whale sharks are not mammals, so they don’t have to surface for air. A lot of times they’re submerged, so they cannot be found.
According to Hoffmayer, last year, a whale shark tagged in the northern Gulf was tracked 260 miles south, in waters more than a mile deep, at 6,000 feet. A pregnant female whale shark tagged off the Yucatan in Hueter’s study emerged in the Atlantic Ocean off the Brazilian coastline, perhaps giving a clue to their birthing habits.
Whale sharks mostly inhabit tropical and warm-temperate seas.
“It’s really hard to study pelagic animals,” Hoffmayer said. “It takes a lot of time and a lot of money. What’s ironic is that this is the largest fish in the ocean and we know so little.
“We virtually know nothing about their reproduction, when they mate, where they give birth. We’re just trying to figure out if the Gulf is just a small part of their range. Are they residents here in the Gulf? How important are these areas for feeding for them? The questions just go on and on.”
The worldwide whale shark population is estimated at 500,000, not an encouraging number according to Hueter. Whale sharks are designated as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List for threatened animals.
But despite the troubling categorization, whale sharks are protected in most parts of the world. In the United States and Mexico it is illegal to retain and harvest a whale shark.
“We think that for once in the shark world, this may be good news,” Hueter said. “In this part of the world they are not hunted and we don’t think they are threatened. Although their numbers are not that great to begin with.
“There might be more whale sharks out there now than there have been in a long time.”
To further the understanding of whale sharks, the Mote Marine Laboratory and the GCRL encourage the public to report any whale shark sightings. To contact Mote, call 800-691-MOTE. To contact the GRCL, call (228) 872-4257 or visit www.usm.edu/gcrl/whaleshark.