At ThaiOceans we are trying to assist research and conservation projects across the globe with their efforts to learn more and ultimately help to protect the biodiversity of our world's oceans. We are based on Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand but conservation of the oceans must be done globally as well as locally. With that in mind we have chosen some key species which have vast migration routes in order to learn more about their movements and reproductive behaviours so that we may better understand how to protect them across the huge areas of the planet which they cover. In doing so we may be able to encourage people of all nations to protect all the oceans from over fishing and destructive fishing practices. In other words, by focusing on a few key species we may be able to help conserve all species! Right now we are concentrating on whale sharks as we are trying to uncover the secrets of their reproduction and migration.

This is the new home of the Asian Whale Shark Database. Our aim is to identify as many whale sharks as humanly possible with your help. If you are a diver who has been lucky enough to take pictures or video of whale sharks wherever you have been diving you can most likely identify your sharks by submitting images to us; it may be that you identify a new shark, never before seen by man, or you may have photographed a shark that is already in our database and therefore give us more information about where the sharks are going.

Since the recent discovery of the world's first ever baby whale shark, shown below, found tethered to a fisherman's line in the Phillipines, we have been on a real mission. We have hypothesised that sharks born near the Phillipines are spending their first year in deep water and later migrating towards the shallow warm and planton rich waters of the tropics around Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Therefore we are desperately trying to link sharks between the Phillipines and Thailand and the route in between without using expensive satellite tags. So your photos could make all the difference. We are interested in photos from anywhere, all over the world, and we will also submit all your images to other global databases including Ecocean. We feel however that our localised database has the potential to produce way more information more quickly! By the way, this little fella was rescued and later released back into the deep waters off the Phillipines.