Marine Megafauna Foundation
The Blue Highways — where the world's largest fish meet the world's largest ships.
Live monitoring of commercial vessel traffic over the Western Indian Ocean's whale shark aggregation areas.
MMF · Live Prototype · —
92%
of whale shark horizontal space use overlaps with large vessel traffic globally. Yet fewer than a handful of sites have formal mitigation in place.
Recent research co-authored by MMF scientists has quantified shipping as a significant, largely unmitigated threat to whale sharks — one they spend roughly half their time directly in the path of.
This map shows five of the region's most important aggregation sites and the commercial shipping traffic currently transiting near them. Vessels passing through a known habitat zone are highlighted in red.