The traditional Banga is a mud or coconut-leaf house. Huts are normally small- made by the boy of the house that want some independance from his family. Often painted with fun: here we have the "white house".... 

 

We are using a 6m fibre glass boat

equipped with 2 engines. 

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We are surveying the waters of the south

Grande Comore, including the Marine

Park of the Coelacanth, the waters

around the Marine Park of Moheli and

the offshore canyons between the islands. 

 

 

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Our surveys, are of 2 types: 

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- Explorational: 

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We are exploring areas of interest such as deep canyons and  offshore area in order to 

discover new species and habitats. 

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- Population study: 

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We are monitoring known populations evolving in known habitat. 

We are trying to understand their range distribution, habits, 

behaviour and acoustic specificities. 

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Species identification and GPS plotting: 

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It is very important to know your species and gives an accurate ID to each encounters. It is sometimes easy but sometimes really challenging. Deep divers such as spermwhales species, beaked whales, do not spent time at the surface and often shows really small part of their body to the surface. It is important to be well trained and confident on each ID. 

GPS plotting helps to dress distribution maps that help to understand habitat use of the animals. Also knowing where animals evolves contribute to better conserve these habitats. 

 

Cetaceans distribution in Comoros: Whales distribution / Dolphin Distribution.

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What's that ? 

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The interest of the photo-identification is multiple and here we are looking at identify individuals within a population. 

We want to follow this animal in the time but also in the space, assess if this individual is faithful to a group or to an area.

 

How that work? 

 

We are trying to get pictures of body parts that can be recognisable form an individual to another. 

Flukes work very well for humpback whales for example, and it is the best way to identify with certitude an individual. Unfortunately, our humpbacks like to rest in Comoros so they don't dive and don't show much their flukes. So what else??? 

The dorsal fin... yes that works but has it limitations. It works for identification of individuals within a local population and few individuals but at the scale of regional population it starts to show it limitation and for identification matching between populations that becomes too much of a challenge. 

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Simply we are trying to find ways to collect informations to resolve our detective work. Once in the computer, it patience work to match, classify individuals. Then it is an even bigger job to analyse data and understand movements, association, dissociations, life expectation, population dynamics. 

Each Whale and dolphin, get a name and an identification number and we record date, time, behaviour, number of individuals in the pod.

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