quinta-feira, 14 de outubro de 2010

Espaço Talassa photo IDea


Since the 2008 season following a request from Dr. Jonathan Gordon we started the ETID, the Espaço Talassa sperm whale photo-id data collection, not with the purpose of creating a new catalogue, but a photo-id online databank opened to all: curious, whale watchers, students, researchers… where it will be possible to download photos, as well as to include them in already existing catalogues, the reference in this field being the catalogue created by IFAW, Dr. Jonathan Gordon and Dra. Lisa Steiner, in the Azores in 1987.

If you are a regular client or a regular visitor of our website, we are glad to let you know that with the help of Marie Guilpin, a St. Andrews university master student, the effort of the team regarding this 2010 season data collection is already online, so, you can visit the link on our website and if you went out with us this season, by searching the date and time you were at sea you can check the whales you saw and even match them with your own pictures.

Also, this season, after two and half season’s of data collection, curiosity started growing and we decided to do a simple analyses on the whales we id so that we had an idea on the number of different animals identified by us, how are they and how often they visited the south of Pico on the last season´s.

So, from this analyses we saw than 761 photos were taken by members of our team and whale watchers, this 761 photos translate in 235 individual whales, from witch 77 were sighted more than once, so next time you visit us, you can see on an album the whales sighted more than once and also some of the ones sighted only once.

You are welcome to visit our photo Id databank at:

http://www.espacotalassa.com/photo_id/photo_id.php