Cami con Ciencia

🦈THEY WERE RIGHT NEXT TO MY FACE🦈
Two days ago I got in the water at Condor Bank, Faial, and met blue sharks (Prionace glauca) for the first time. Scared, amazed, and euphoric all in the same breath.

I have spent years watching the ocean from a boat 🚤 From the surface you get a fin, a shadow, a shape. You do not understand the animal. You do not feel the size of it. Being in the blue with them was nothing less than humbling…

Everything I learned is in the slides 🤞🏻swipe through them and learn!! 🤓The name, the size, how far one of them travelled, why you never meet a mixed group, and the number at the end that I still can’t shake. Isn’t it insane?🤯

The last slide is the one I want you to sit with. Condor is a protected seamount, and I’m grateful for it 🌈but a blue shark doesn’t stay inside a protected area. She crosses an ocean. Protecting a place is not the same as protecting a traveller 🤞🏻
I went in scared. I came out changed.
📍 Condor Bank, Faial, Azores
🦈 Prionace glauca — tintureira / tiburón azul
•
•
•

I spy with my little eye 👁️ a playful ***mwhale opening its mouth 👹
•
•
•

Sometimes I also spend time under 🌊🐠🐙
•
•
•
📸 OM SYSTEM

The sweetest underwater potato out there 🥔 oh yo be a beaked whale and avoid the world by diving deeper into the blue 🖖🏻 forever grateful for this encounters 🤍
•
•
•

Hey there! The best pic I have so far of an adult spotted dolphin that came to the boat several times vocalizing really loud🐬
•
•
•

🐋 A small but meaningful milestone to share!
Our research on killer whale predation on deep-diving cetaceans in Madeira has just been cited in a chapter of Ridgway & Harrison’s Handbook of Marine Mammals, Volume 3: River Dolphins and Larger Toothed Whales (Elsevier, 2026) one of the foundational reference works in marine mammal science. Even more special: the chapter on dwarf and pygmy s***m whales, written by Robin W. Baird (Cascadia Research Collective), features one of my photographs documenting a killer whale attacking a pygmy s***m whale (Kogia breviceps) off Madeira. Seeing our fieldwork and our paper, Dávila et al. (2026) in Marine Mammal Science contribute to the global understanding of these elusive, rarely observed species is exactly why we do what we do.
Pygmy s***m whales are among the hardest cetaceans to study. They surface quietly, dive deep, and are almost never seen well at sea. Capturing a predation event like this is a reminder of how much there still is to learn about Madeira’s waters.
None of this would have been possible without the continued support and collaboration of the Museu da Baleia da Madeira. Thank you for your partnership and for everything you do to advance cetacean research and conservation in these waters. 🙏
•
•
•

Finally 🤝😅🐋
•
•
•