A gigantic underwater museum filled with 400 sculptures will be created in Mexico’s West Coast National Park in on the Yucatán Peninsula. The artistic director is Jason de Caires Taylor, famous for his underwater sculptures, but other artists will also be involved in the project.

The Subaquatic Sculpture Museum is designed to relieve some of the pressure placed on the regions natural reefs by divers and snorkelers; the national park currently receives almost 300,000 visitors each year and quit a few of these vacationers do not behave as careful around the reefs as they should.

“If they [the tourists] swim near the corals, the divers with little experience might kick them with a fin or hit them with the oxygen tank,” says national park director Jaime

González, adding that some tourists even climb coral reefs and walk on top of them, breaking and shattering them.

In 2005, the park administration submerged 110 hollow domes and concrete structures in layers in the Sac Bajo area in a similar effort to divert tourists from the natural reefs, and this project has already become a success story.

“At first the people of Isla Mujeres told us that they were never going to bring tourists there, but after a few years it became a must-see attraction,” says González.

The park administration is planning to launch the new underwater museum next month by submerging four sculptures in human form. All 400 sculptures in the museum will be made from pH neutral concrete to allow rapid growth of algae and incrustation of marine invertebrates, such as corals. Eventually, the new habitat will also begin to attract reef fish – just like the Sac Bajo project.

“The underwater museum will draw many tourists, allowing us to give a rest to the natural reefs. It’s like a restoration process,” says González.

If everything goes according to plan, some 250 sculptures will have been submerged by April 2010. Each sculpture will be human sized and rest on a four square meter base. Some parts of the museum will be theme based, such as the “Coral Collector” gallery and the “Dream Catcher” section which features bottles filled with messages sent by castaways. There will also be a series of sculptures depicting Maya warriors.

Shark tours have become increasingly popular in Hawaiian waters, but tour operators that feed shark to assure their presence are now facing opposition from several different directions.

Sharks are an integral part of Hawaiian folklore and some Native Hawaiians consider sharks to be ancestral gods, aumakua, who helps fishermen by chasing fish into nets and guiding canoes safely back to shore. Tour boats feeding sharks for entertainment is therefore viewed as disrespectful by many.

“The disrespect of the aumakua, that’s what hurts us the most,” said Leighton Tseu, a Native Hawaiian who considers sharks ancestral gods.

Surfers and swimmers are on the other hand more worried about the potential hazards of teaching sharks to associate people with food. There are also fears that shark feeding will attract larger numbers of sharks to these waters and that the practise of feeding them will lure them closer to shore than before.

A third concern has been raised by environmentalists – how does daily shark feedings affects the ecological balance of Hawaiian waters? George Burgess, shark researcher at the University of Florida, says shark populations are likely to increase in areas where tours feed sharks daily, and that an inflated shark population might consume more prey, depleting other marine life. Burgess also fears that the feedings may attract so many sharks to those spots that sharks become scarce in other regions. This is naturally a large problem, since sharks are apex predators necessary for the overall balance of the ecosystems in which they exist.

Carl Meyer of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology does not share Burgess’s concerns, at least not for Hawaiian waters. Research carried out by Meyer shows that a majority of the sharks found at Haleiwa, a popular tour site, are Galapagos and Sandbar sharks – two types of sharks rarely documented attacking humans. Most of Hawaii shark attacks are carried out by Tiger sharks, and these sharks only account for 2 percent of the tour site’s sharks. Meyer’s research also shows that sharks at the North Shore tour site have not made any changes to their seasonal breeding and migration cycles since the feedings started.

Legal matters
Feeding sharks in Hawaiian waters is prohibited by state law, while federal law – which governs waters between 3 miles to 200 miles from the coast – prohibits the feeding of sharks off Hawaii and Pacific island territories like American Samoa. Fishermen are however allowed to bait sharks, and scientists engaging in government-funded research are also exempt from the ban.

The National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu is currently investigating Hawaiian tour operators offering shark safaris.

The tiny whale shark caught off the Philippine coast near San Antonio on March 6 has been confirmed by WWF to be the smallest live whale shark on record ever to be captured and released in the Philippines and arguably also the smallest living whale shark ever to be scientifically recorded.

Picture by WWF PF. Support WWF

The impressive Whale shark, Rhincodon typus, is the largest fish on the planet. The biggest specimen regarded as accurately recorded was caught in Pakistani waters in 1947 and measured 12.65 metres (41.50 ft) in length, with a girth of 7 metres (23.0 ft) and a weight exceeding 21.5 tonnes (47,300 lb).

The small specimen caught near San Antonio was on the other hand no longer than 15 in (38 cm) and may be what biologists call a neonate, i.e. a newborn. This is very interesting, since we still do not know to which part or parts of the world Whale shark females migrate to give birth to their pups. The finding of this tiny pup has caused scientists to speculate that the Philippine waters might be one of the places on the planet where the biggest fish in the world is born.

So, how did this petite Whale shark end up in human hands? On the morning of March 7, word reached Tourism Officer Pedragosa that a whale shark had been caught near San Antonio the day before. Pedragosa immediately sent Butanding Interaction Officer Guadamor to inform the town’s Municipal Agricultural officer Rabulan, and at this point, Aca, WWF’s Project Leader in Donsol, the municipality in which San Antonio is located, also became involved. When a shark is caught, time is of course crucial – examining the animal is important from a scientific point of view, but you don’t want to subject the shark to more stress than necessary. Aca therefore joined the officers of tourism, agriculture, and interaction at the tourism office right away and together they hastily drew up an operational plan and headed for San Antonio. At this stage, Berango, Chief of Police of Pilar, had also been alerted and Ravanilla, Regional Director of Tourism, had informed the resorts closest to the site.

The Chief of Police met up with Aca and the ministers at the seashore, where they found not a gigantic whale but a small stick jammed into the sand with a rope leading away from it into the ocean. As they followed the rope, they saw that it was tied around the tail of the smallest whale shark they had ever encountered before.

Whale Shark – Picture GNU Licensed

The team examined the shark to make sure that it had not been hurt, gave it food, measured it and documented the unique find. Less then three hours after the report first reached the tourism officer, the shark had been safely transferred to a big, water-filled plastic bag and the team was now heading towards deeper water where the shark could be released. Releasing it close to shore was not considered safe enough since the shallows in this area contains a lot of nets.

All this action took place in Sorsogon, a Philippine province famous for hosting the largest known annual congregation of whale sharks in the world. The province has become a popular destination for vacationers interested in snorkelling with sharks and going on shark safaris, and WWF is therefore working with local residents to develop and improve sustainable eco tourism practices along the coast.

On South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, residents of the fisher town Port Lincoln have found a new way of turning fish into a profit, The Age reports. Tourists are now welcomed to tour the marina and swim with the Bluefin tuna in a pen. According to Matt Waller, a former skipper on a tuna fleet, the interest in tuna fish has spiked thanks to the two documentaries Tuna Cowboys and Tuna Wranglers. The success of Tony Santic and Dean Lukin has also been important for the new found tuna curiosity among tourists.

Interested in swimming with tunas during your next holiday? Read the full article here:

Tony Šantić was born in Croatia in 1952 and moved to Australia with his family when he was 6 years old. Šantić is now a well-known owner of successful thoroughbred race horses, but he started out as an orange roughie fisher with a leaky boat off the coast of Tasmania. He then became a tuna fisher and a tuna farmer in Port Lincoln.

Dinko “Dean” Lukin is a tuna fisherman who became a famous a weightlifter in the 1980s, and then returned to the family fishing business in Port Lincoln. He is Australia’s only winner of an Olympic gold medal for weightlifting and he carried the Australian flag during the closing ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games.