So I wanted to get in touch with him, and I wanted to know if they do actually use these opportunities for data collection.

Oh, one of the really nice things about working with whale sharks is they have that beautiful pattern of like white dots and, and lines and things on them.

Uh, so we can use photographic identification.

So we can take photos of them.

We can see which individual it is and how often it's being resighted, whether it's moving from place to place, things like that.

And the good thing is that when we're working with citizen scientists or tourism operators, of course like so many people these days have cameras in the water, so we can noninvasively do some quite detailed population monitoring and start working out over time whether the population is going up and down.

We can look at things like boat impacts, like fishing entanglement injuries, that kind of thing.

So here's what Simon had to say about that.