Calderones de Canarias

Calderones de Canarias is a photo-identification project of pilot whales that live in Canary waters, mainly in the southwest of Tenerife, La Gomera and La Palma.

We started this project in 2014 with very few photographs of different pilot whales and currently we have more than 500 photo-identified individuals. From the beginning we decided to carry out this work through the Facebook platform to be able to share easily and that all the people who were interested in knowing our pilot whales could access the information, being the first open photo-identification work.

This project is a work of citizen science since all the people who participate and collaborate are workers from the whale watching boats of the different islands and we take advantage of our time at sea to be able to take photos of the dorsal fins, which are then analyzed and classified in our spare time.

We believe that this work is important for many reasons: it is possible to monitor the resident groups, by collecting data on different islands we can know when and where they have been seen, in the case of animals with problems or injuries we can see how they evolve, know the groups among them, monitoring of the offspring that are born and die, among other things.

We have participated in some documentaries, we carry out dissemination and information talks, we are part of the steering committee of the World Heritage Site 

calderonesdecanarias@hotmail.com