Figure 1.
Whale shark study area off the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.
The locations of PSAT tagging are indicated by open circles (n = 35).
Figure 2.
Length-frequency histogram of conventionally tagged whale sharks of known length in the Yucatan study area 2003–2011 (n = 728).
Table 1.
Summary of whale shark (Rhincodon typus) conventional tagging off the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula.
Table 2.
Summary of whale shark conventional tag resightings reported by project biologists and whale shark ecotourism operators within the study area.
Table 3.
Summary of 35 PSAT tags deployed on whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) off the northeastern Yucatan Peninsula.
Table 4.
Estimated parameters for PSAT tags analyzed with UKFSST and associated mean speeds from the predicted most probable track (MPT).
Figure 3.
Most probable tracks of whale sharks moving into the Gulf of Mexico.
(A) Sharks 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 30. (B) Sharks 16, 22, 25, 26, and 27. The location of the Flower Garden Banks in the northwestern Gulf are indicated by a black asterisk in 3A.
Figure 4.
Most probable tracks of whale sharks moving into the vicinity of the Straits of Florida and Caribbean Sea.
(A) Sharks 13, 14, 20, 24, and 28. (B) Sharks 5, 17, 21, 23 and 35.
Figure 5.
Most probable track of Shark 15 (“Rio Lady”) derived from the unscented Kalman filter (red line).
The locations of the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago (black asterisk) and very small whale sharks (black plus signs) as reported by Kukuyev (1996) [93] are indicated near the tag’s pop-up location (lat/long for newborn shark data points from Martin (2007) [90]).
Figure 6.
Habitat utilization distributions for satellite-tagged whale sharks based on their most probable tracks.
(A) All sharks combined; (B) Females; (C) Males; (D) Smaller females (<8 mTL); (E) Larger females (≥8 m TL). The 1,000 m bathymetric contour approximates the shelf edge.
Figure 7.
A comparison of the tracks from the double-tagging of Shark 27.
The SPOT track (blue line) includes location qualities of 3, 2, 1, 0, and A. The highest quality SPOT locations (LC≥1) have a black dot inside their white circular symbol. The light-derived PSAT results as raw geolocations (broken line of inset figure), the uncorrected MPT (red line), and the bathymetrically corrected MPT (green line) are shown for the same time period as that of the SPOT tag.