Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@guardian.co.tt

Cor­po­rate Sec­re­tary of Fish­er­men and Friends of the Sea (FFOS), Gary Aboud, is urg­ing au­thor­i­ties to con­duct a full necrop­sy on the whale shark dis­cov­ered near the Cha­ca­ca­bana Ho­tel in Ch­aguara­mas to de­ter­mine the cause of its death.

The gen­tle gi­ant was first spot­ted alive on Sat­ur­day morn­ing off the Peake Yacht Ser­vices Ma­ri­na. Eye­wit­ness­es told Guardian Me­dia the shark lin­gered in the area for about 30 min­utes be­fore swim­ming away.

“When I turned around, I saw a big, big, big whale. I was like, I have to cap­ture this mo­ment. And I won’t lie, it was one of the great­est mo­ments in the short space of time I’ve been liv­ing on earth,” said Leslieann Sam­bra­no, of Peake Yacht Ser­vices.

The whale shark was found dead yes­ter­day morn­ing, rough­ly 0.5 miles from where it was first seen. Ac­cord­ing to the FFOS, the shark had a vis­i­ble wound on its back and was ob­served swim­ming in dis­tress pri­or to its death.

Aboud is call­ing on the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries, the Min­istry of Plan­ning and the En­vi­ron­ment, and oth­er stake­hold­ers to de­ter­mine whether the whale shark died as a re­sult of a ves­sel strike, plas­tic in­ges­tion, hy­dro­car­bon con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, or an­oth­er pre­ventable cause.

“With­out this knowl­edge, we can­not pro­tect what re­mains of our ma­rine bio­di­ver­si­ty. We must do bet­ter. Our si­lence and in­ac­tion are dead­ly,” Aboud said.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that the T&T Ma­rine Mam­mal Strand­ing Net­work will han­dle the car­cass.