Estimating the long-term effects of whale shark feeding practices

Increasing opportunities for up-close encounters with sharks and other animals are making wildlife tourism one of the fastest growing tourism sectors -- leading ecology experts to venture to one of the world's main sites to investigate the effects of tourism on endangered whale sharks. At Oslob in the Philippines, Flinders University's Southern Shark Ecology Group and Global Ecology Lab joined local Filipino researchers to measure how the daily feeding regimes for resident whale shark population might have affected their behaviour and physiology by assessing their activity and metabolic requirements.