Welcome onboard!

For this year to be good, as much for you as for CIRCE and all the cetaceans, think about renewing your application to the "Friends of CIRCE".

For all our friends connected to internet, you will find an application (or renewal) form on our website: www.circe-asso.org on the page "Friends of CIRCE" or click directly here.

For the others, no worry, we thought about attaching an application form with this Newsletter!

For all: our "justifications for fiscal deduction" forms are ready, you will discover yours once we will receive your donation: CIRCE gives you the opportunity to start the year with a donation and to lessen your taxes

Summary of the year 2002

On the Gibraltar side:

Our first full season of research volunteers was a success: from May, all the places available were already booked. In June, many sperm whales and a few fin whales were observed. In July, CIRCE was assisting a BBC Natural History Filming Unit who was doing a film on killer whales (we will advise you by email of the broadcast date). Beautiful success as the BBC was really satisfied with the shots taken and CIRCE's team took advantage of those long days with killer whales to identify the entire population of the Strait of Gibraltar.

The research volunteers who came to join us in August were impressed by the abundance of the cetaceans and the diversity of the Strait: pilot whales, sperm whales, killer whales, bottlenose dolphins, striped dolphins, common dolphins et still a few fin whales!

A huge thanks to all the research volunteers who participated to our researches this summer, thanks to them we have classified and recorded thousands of pictures and computerised all our sightings data. An enormous work that could not have been done without the help of all.

On the Ligurian Sea side:

This year, the weather was not favourable to our experiments; we stayed many days at the harbour waiting for Sir Mistral to calm down. As for the fin whales, they were a lot less frequent compared to last year. Above all, we discovered new technical problems with the Argos tags that we hope we could be able to put on fin whales for the third consecutive year! However, we do go forward: we find solutions and other problems arise. Our reserves of perseverance, patience, ingenuity and imagination are far from being over: we will end up with success to tell you what the Mediterranean fin whales do in winter.

Ask the program

To cheer up your days, we chose to talk to you about Flipper; do you know its species? Discover it in page 2. Then we will tell you how we transform whales into indicators and what they teach us on the ocean depths.

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CIRCE Newsletter n° 4 - made by Anne Collet, Philippe Verborgh & Christophe Guinet