Bay Islands shark sightings
The Bay Island shark sightings project
Realising the need for any and all data from sharks in Honduras, Sea Leucas and Gabriela Ochoa (Ilili) began collecting shark reports from the Bay Islands in 2018. Citizen science is a powerful tool and we created a webform, sharing it with dive shops, fishers and other stakeholders. Since then we have partnered with Roatan Marine Park (RMP) and Utila’s Whale Shark and Ocean Research Center. Moving our shark sightings form to the RMP page has boosted our reach as well as allowing the public to upload photos of their sighting. Sea Leucas currently maintains and curates the database and we release updates in blog format quarterly. We have also produced simple distribution heatmaps for some key species listed below:
We use local dive sites to help provide easy location definitions for participants. Here is a map of the dive sites we have so far. Big thanks to Nic Bach, BICA Utila, and Megan St Roas for helping us with these locations. If you have dive site information and would like to share it, please email us at sealeucasconsulting@gmail.com.