Location: UK
Topics include: Whales; Dolphins; Porpoise
If you live or work on the coast or at sea, then you can help the Sea Watch Foundation with its valuable work. If you sight whales, dolphins and porpoises and want to submit your sightings and recording forms, please return them to Sea Watch – every bit helps!
Location: Canada
Topics include: Whales; Dolphins; Porpoises
The beauty of the Ocean Wise Sightings Network is that by employing a variety of outreach events, community members are encouraged to contribute to our conservation efforts and report their sightings. This data plays an integral role in various conservation projects concerning cetacean health and monitoring, and can be useful in identifying critical habitat, developing species-specific recovery strategies, and implementing regulations related to cetaceans and harmful human activities. Individual sighting reports are also relayed in real-time to Ocean Wise’s WhaleReport Alert System (WRAS), a tool developed for ship captains of large commercial vessels (e.g., ferries, tugs, and freighters) to alert them of the presence of whales within 10 nautical miles of their location. The WRAS functions to provide advance warning to mariners to reduce their impacts on nearby cetaceans by slowing down, re-routing, or halting their vessel.
Location: UK
Topics include: Whales; Dolphins; Porpoise
National Whale and Dolphin Watch is a week long citizen science event dedicated to studying and protecting cetaceans in UK waters. By taking part in National Whale and Dolphin Watch, the data you submit plays a invaluable role in understanding cetacean distribution, abundance, and population trends, as well as increase public awareness about the incredible whales, dolphins and porpoises that inhabit our seas. All you need to do is turn your eyes to the sea to help out!
Location: Belgium
Topics include: Whales; Dolphins; Porpoises; Animal Strandings
Collecting data on strandings and sightings of marine mammals is important as such data can provide us with a lot of information about marine mammals, their population trends, problems they face, and eventually on the condition of the marine environment in general. The aim is to gather all Belgian marine mammal observations and strandings. The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) has been responsible for coordinating research into the strandings and cause of death of marine mammals in Belgium since the early 1990s. The institute produces annual reports on observations and strandings of marine mammals in Belgium with the collaboration of SEALIFE Blankenberge and the Universities of Liège and Ghent.
Location: Scotland
Topics include: Dolphins
Have you been lucky enough to watch killer whales in Scotland? Or do you enjoy watching seals in areas visited by killer whales? Do you have images or footage of killer whale foraging behaviour? – Either way, we would love to learn from your observations and recordings.
Location: UK
Topics include: Dolphins
Welcome to Citizen Fins! This project combines research and citizen science photo-identification data of bottlenose dolphins, to help understand how the pattern of movements of bottlenose dolphins along the east coast of Scotland and into NE England is changing. Knowing about dolphin movements assists population monitoring and evaluation of the potential impacts of offshore developments on these animals along the east coasts of Scotland and England.
Location: online
Topics include: Dolphins; Whales; Manatees
Do dolphins have “language?” What is the meaning of a humpback’s song? What information does a manatee call convey? Marine mammal acoustic communication is extremely diverse, complex, and many species have neural wiring supporting a potentially sophisticated communication system. Yet in the absence of “Rosetta Stone,” our efforts to decode it have been challenging. Our approach to decoding marine mammal communication is to use large datasets, both audio and video, to analyze behaviors and calls produced by marine mammals in search for individual variation, call categories, and sequential information. This data will be eventually used to conduct the playback experiment to establish the potential function or “meaning” of the call. Understanding form and function of marine mammal communication goes well beyond the quest of whether or not dolphins have “language,” as it has practical conservation benefits: tracking individuals via passive acoustics, warning boaters about the presence of manatees or whales, and using acoustics to evaluate a marine mammal’s health, activities and crucial habitats.
Location: Canada
Topics include: Whales; Dolphins; Porpoises; Sea Turtles
Did you see a whale? Let us know! Just two minutes of your time helps protect the whales in our waters. When you report your cetacean (whale, dolphin, and porpoise) and sea turtle sightings, large ships in your area will be immediately alerted to the presence of the animals and will be able to take measures to reduce the risk of ship strike and disturbance.
