My mentor, Thomas Peschak, once gave me this piece of advice during my early days: work on stories in your own backyard and invest time in them. Although Thailand has some great dive sites to enjoy – notably the Similan Islands – my home waters are plagued with various conservation problems as I learned during my years as a researcher.

Those darker stories have increasingly captured my interest and have become a marine storytelling niche of mine. In the early days of my career as a photojournalist, I often spent my time scrolling through social media posts, looking for dead animals, and then booking the earliest flights I could find to head straight to the carcass. Following the dead was how I worked – and I still am today, to a lesser extent.

It often ended up in goose chases like a few incidents in the Adang-Rawi Archipelago and the Tarutao Archipelago of Satun province, the southernmost tip of Thailand’s Andaman Coast. Due to less infrastructure and less popularity compared to the Northern Andaman dive sites, not many people – not even local researchers – were aware that this archipelago is a hotspot for whale sharks in Thai waters. It wasn’t known until very recently when these waters received more visits from local divers due to the travel restrictions in place during the pandemic. Without the pandemic, I doubt that anybody would have thought that this sleepy archipelago was about to be recognised as one of the Important Shark and Ray Areas (ISRA) for whale sharks and sicklefin devil rays by the IUCN Shark Specialist Group in 2024. 

I occasionally heard reports of dead whale sharks floating around the archipelago. When one of my friends discovered a bloating carcass while he was out diving in the area, he managed to take some images of the dead whale shark underwater. However, the divers did not manage to tow it back to the island due to its massive size compared to their tiny longtail boat, and the sunlight was dying, so they let the carcass drift off.