Seasonal aggregations have been observed in recent years with the result that whale sharks have become a prime target of eastern fisheries. As an example, last year three villages in India alone slaughtered some 1,000 whale sharks. Currently, whale sharks are protected only along the eastern seaboard of the United States, the Maldives, the western coast of Australia and in the Philippines. SRI's goal is worldwide protection of whale sharks, including a global ban on trade in whale shark products, but to achieve this objective it is necessary to accumulate baseline data.
Scant data exists because the species was never considered commercially viable.
Although our research is revealing worldwide movements of whale sharks, the size of the global population, the life span and rate of growth of whale sharks remain unknown. It is not even known if whale sharks around the world are members of a single global population or are discrete populations. From a conservation perspective, it is critical to determine whether the whale shark is represented by a single interbreeding population or numerous, reproductively isolated populations. If whale sharks from different areas are reproductively isolated, the removal of a few individuals from one breeding population will not threaten survival of the species. If, on the other hand, there is but a single worldwide population of these animals, the slaughter of whale sharks anywhere in the ocean diminishes the odds for continued survival of the species as a whole.