Sightings are up. Again.
For the Isle of Man, this year breaks a long, quiet streak. Basking sharks, those gentle, endangered giants, are swimming these waters. The Manx Shark Foundation wants to know why.
Gemma Scotts, a shark scientist, and Tom Morgan, a fisheries officer, formed the foundation for one reason. Clarity.
“We need to try and work out why they’ve come back,” Morgan says.
Is there a specific pull? Or did the sharks just happen to fancy a trip this season? Plenty of theories exist. Few hard answers.
They spent two years looking before launching the charity. They teamed up with Mareco, the environment department, the Wildlife Trust, and local whale watchers. It was heavy lifting. Underwater cameras. Drone flights. Analyzing egg cases. Talking to anglers who might have seen something unusual.
Now they are crunching data. Sighting records meet sea conditions. Prey availability maps onto location.
And then there’s the public. You.
Sightings from people on boats, beaches, ferries—whatever they are called here, citizen science. It’s cheap. It’s wide. It’s valuable. Morgan thinks so, at least.
But it isn’t just about basking sharks.
Skates, rays, smaller sharks. They get ignored. Overlooked. Yet they are the glue in a healthy ocean ecosystem.
We still know so little about them. Huge knowledge gaps.
We don’t know how they use Manx waters. We don’t know what pressures they face. The data is missing.
Maybe the sharks return because the water is right. Maybe it is chance.
Who knows?
