Mark O'Connor

But I guess this one might be the first.

It's certainly the first one we've been able to validate.

And it's not unusual to see them alone, but everyone in the area and everyone in Donegal Bay Trust, we certainly have our eyes wide open expecting to see another one pop up any minute, any hour or any day.

Certainly they are known to be in the bay and numbers are rising each year but for most years and certainly recent years we've seen perhaps large numbers but only over one day or one week.

But we had quite a large amount of sightings over a few days in April and we thought that was our abundance, that was our sighting.

But they have moved back from the coast of Mayo.

They seem to have tracked back in towards Donegal Bay, which of course is quite a large bay and it's hard to understand exactly how many that we have or had.

But the plankton moves with the wind or the currents a lot of the time and the sharks just follow.

But it's a real bio indicator, a real indicator for us as to the health of this habitat and this bay.

because plankton isn't something you would see with the naked eye, but when we start to see sharks show up in their dozens, or possibly in their 20s, 30s, in each sighting, then we know that it must be a very abundant food source in the bay.

Yeah, so the sightings we had this week, a lot of them were from Mullochmoor Head, which I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with.

It's an iconic headland.

It gives you that height advantage and we were counting over a dozen sharks within 50 to 100 meters of the shore, so only a few swimming pool lengths away.

it gave a really nice opportunity for the community, not just citizen scientists or people there formally observing the animals, but just passers-by to come and see the basking sharks literally on their doorstep.

And that's something that isn't that usual.

We know we have basking sharks each year.

We know they're in the bay, but to see so many at the surface and for that surface to be so close to shore is certainly quite special.

Absolutely.

And we feel that

For people to want to protect something, they have to connect with it and they have to understand it.