The Galápagos Marine Reserve has protected the waters immediately around the islands since 1998. The problem researchers kept running into is that the animals the reserve exists to protect — whale sharks, rays, turtles, marine mammals — don't stay inside it. They're migratory, and they spend much of their lives well outside any protected boundary.
The Galápagos Whale Shark Project, which began satellite-tagging whale sharks in 2005, is what actually proved this. Tracking data showed a real, repeated connection between the Galápagos and Cocos Island National Park in Costa Rica — the same individual sharks moving between the two. Outside either reserve, they were exposed to exactly the threats you'd expect: industrial fishing fleets, ship strikes, pollution. One incident often cited in this context: a single illegal fishing vessel was found carrying more than 7,000 sharks.
In October 2021, the governments of Ecuador and Costa Rica acted on that tracking data directly, declaring a new marine protected corridor — sometimes called a "swimway" — connecting the two national parks. It added roughly 120,000 square kilometers of protected water between them, specifically to give migratory species like whale sharks a protected route, not just a protected home base.
It's a rare, concrete example of tagging research — the same kind of work GSD's citizen-science guests support — leading directly to real government policy, not just a research paper.
Source: adapted from Galápagos Shark Diving's own published account of the Ecuador–Costa Rica marine-reserve expansion, and the Galápagos Whale Shark Project's tagging research.