Whale Sharks & Shipping Risk
Whale sharks spend much of their time at the surface, in the same waters as the world's busiest shipping lanes. Collisions with large vessels are almost never recorded — but the research suggests they may be a major and largely invisible source of mortality for the world's largest fish.
This monitor plots live vessel positions against the ocean areas that matter most for whale sharks, and accumulates how much vessel traffic passes through each one over time. It turns a threat nobody can see into something that can be measured, mapped, and managed.
Open the full-screen monitorThe science behind it
MMF scientists co-authored the global studies that established ship strike as a significant threat to whale sharks: mapping where vessel traffic and whale shark habitat overlap, identifying the priority sites for collision management, and showing that a warming ocean will push whale sharks further into busy shipping routes.
The monitor builds directly on that work — the habitat areas it tracks are the core habitats identified in those analyses, and the live traffic layer shows what is moving through them right now.
Key papers
- Womersley, F.C., et al. (2022) Global collision-risk hotspots of marine traffic and the world’s largest fish, the whale shark. PNAS 119(20). doi
- Womersley, F.C., et al. (2024) Identifying priority sites for whale shark ship collision management globally. Science of the Total Environment 934. doi
- Womersley, F.C., et al. (2024) Climate-driven global redistribution of an ocean giant predicts increased threat from shipping. Nature Climate Change 14. doi
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Live vessel monitoring, the research behind it, and the conservation work it informs are funded by our supporters.
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