Marine park ranger, Marit Pistor, attended the CARI’MAM workshop & meetings late October 2019. Discussed in the meeting is the deployment of about 20 hydrophones throughout the Caribbean to record the distribution of sea mammals. The hydrophones work for two months then retrieved for data collection. The data is then sent to PhD students in Toulon (European France) who will convert our data and send back the results which will be shared with everyone from this network.

The event began with explanations on how the program they use to process the data works, examples of the hydrophones were already tested and other similar researches that have taken place. The second day had 3 workshops; how to prepare the hydrophone, how to deploy it (we tested it in the pool) and training on the software that would be used.

In the afternoon we’ve had a meeting on the placement of the hydrophones as there are a limited number of hydrophones available and it would be beneficial for the research to cover many islands of the Caribbean as it will generate data over a large area.

In the last two days, the numbers of persons attending the meetings increased and they shared the experiences of other islands with marine mammals and the testing of the first two hydrophones (neighbor islands Saba & St Barth’s). Multiple workshops followed about communication, whale watching, by catch and photo ID (+ data analyses). It was a very informative meeting and very nice to meet the other participants from CARI’MAM, who we hope to work with for a long time!

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