Basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) are largely solitary, following highly individualized migration routes, yet they exhibit poorly understood aggregation behaviors, ranging from pairs to groups of up to 1,000 individuals. These surface aggregations put sharks at risk of boat strikes and are thought to be driven in part by localized zooplankton availability, though observational evidence suggests that food alone may not fully explain this behavior. Previous modeling approaches have successfully identified long-range basking shark migration trends but have not accurately reproduced behavior at finer spatial scales, and commonly used chlorophyll a proxies for zooplankton have produced inconsistent results when compared with sightings data.

This study presents the first individual-based model (IBM) of basking shark aggregation behavior, simulating shark movement around the Inishowen Peninsula, Ireland, from 1982 to 2018. Rather than relying on a phytoplankton proxy, zooplankton was simulated directly to capture fine-scale prey patchiness. Four behavioral submodels were tested and compared with three decades of sightings data from the Irish Basking Shark Group and Irish Whale and Dolphin Group: sharks seeking food only, sharks seeking other sharks only, sharks seeking both food and other sharks, and a random-movement control.

The combined food-and-social submodel produced the most realistic results, with lower error and greater qualitative correspondence to observed sightings data than the food-only, social-only, or random submodels, which rarely generated aggregations larger than two individuals. These findings indicate that basking shark aggregations emerge from a combination of environmental and social drivers rather than food availability or chance alone. This model demonstrates the viability of IBMs for simulating basking shark behavior, offers a flexible framework that can incorporate improved environmental and behavioral data as they become available, and provides a foundation for future research into the drivers of basking shark aggregation.