MAYA BAY, Thailand : On any given day in Thailand's Maya Bay, up to 40 blacktip reef sharks cruise in the cyan shallows while about 4,000 tourists visit its white-sand beach flanked by towering cliffs.Shark numbers have improved since almost every last one was driven from the bay by the influx of tour boa
MAYA BAY, Thailand : On any given day in Thailand's Maya Bay, up to 40 blacktip reef sharks cruise in the cyan shallows while about 4,000 tourists visit its white-sand beach flanked by towering cliffs.
Authorities allowed limited tourism to resume in 2022, and now conservationists say shark numbers are thinning out again, leaving Maya Bay struggling to strike a balance between preserving a pristine ecosystem and sustaining livelihoods dependent on tourism. She and other researchers at the Maya Shark Watch Project use underwater cameras and drones to count sharks and observe their behaviour, feeding areas, and breeding patterns. In the year between November 2021, when they initiated a pilot study, and the end of 2022, they noticed a decrease in the number of sharks as tourists gradually returned.
But with the number of sharks already dwindling, authorities and conservationists are intent on keeping tourists from swimming in the bay and driving away the baby sharks, which hide in the shallows and coral reefs from the cannibalistic adults.
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