Mexico, specifically the area north of Isla Mujeres on the Yucatan Peninsula, is the seasonal home of large numbers of whale sharks over the summer months. It probably offers the world’s most consistent sightings of whale sharks for tourists over the northern hemisphere summer.

Every whale shark is identifiable based on their unique spot pattern. Over 8,000 tourists and researchers have submitted photos to a global sighting database (www.whaleshark.org), identifying over 10,000 individual whale sharks. Most of those have been juvenile males, however. Even the largest feeding areas are home to less than 2,000 sharks – and some popular tourist destinations, such as Tanzania and Honduras, seem to have less than 200.

A new paper, led by the Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines (LAMAVE), with help from the Tubbataha Management Office and myself, has showcased the benefits to sharks that can be achieved by effective marine protected areas (MPAs).

My work at Mafia began in 2012. Dr Chris Rohner and I, both from the Marine Megafauna Foundation, won a research contract advertised by WWF Tanzania. Our assigned objectives were to find out what the whale sharks were doing at Mafia, and to identify the factors that influence their abundance.

Plastic in the ocean is a problem. That will be news to precisely none of you. It’s still worth talking about though, even now. Plastic is an obvious part of all of our lives and, despite the global scale of the concern, it’s one of the most immediately actionable marine conservation issues.