Behind the whale sharks divers photograph at Darwin and Wolf sits a research effort most guests never see directly: the Galápagos Whale Shark Project, founded in 2011 under the direction of project founder Jonathan R. Green. Galápagos Shark Diving, which began operating trips in 2019, structures its business specifically to support that project's work, directing about 80% of company profits toward it.
That funding translates into equipment and time that field research actually depends on: satellite tags capable of tracking a shark's movement across ocean basins, blood-sampling kits used to study reproductive biology, and boat time to get researchers on site when a tagging opportunity arises. None of that is cheap or easy to secure on a research budget alone, which is part of why the liveaboard-funding model exists in the first place.
The science those tools support is aimed at some of the most basic and still-unanswered questions about whale sharks in this part of the world — their migration routes, their diving behavior, and their reproductive cycle, the last of which researchers have investigated in part through ultrasound examinations of tagged animals. The project's scope extends beyond Galápagos itself, tracking connectivity between the islands, Cocos Island, and the wider Eastern Pacific migratory corridor that links them.
For a diver, the practical result is that a trip booked for the wildlife encounter is also, indirectly, a contribution to one of the more sustained whale shark research efforts in the Eastern Pacific — one built on more than a decade of continuous data collection rather than a single expedition's worth of observations.
Source: adapted from Galápagos Shark Diving's own published article on its 2023 support for the Galápagos Whale Shark Project.