African Aquatic Conservation Fund Inc

The west african sea turtle program led projects in gabon, equatorial guinea and cote d'ivoire. In gabon we continued to coordinate the gabon sea turtle partnership, a network of projects to protect sea turtles and their habitat through beach surveillance, research, threat reduction, capacity-building and outreach. In equatorial guinea we continued to monitor sea turtle threats and conducted a national awareness-raising campaign. In cote d'ivoire we continued to collaborate with local partners to monitor and protect 50 km of nesting beaches and carry out community-based conservation initiatives, as well as implement the country's first marine protected area. We published 3 peer-reviewed scientific studies.

The african cetaceans program conducted continuing passive acoustic monitoring (pam) projects off the west coast of madagascar, off the nampula coast of mozambique, and off senegal. The pam work in the mozambique channel was part of a multi-partner effort to mitigate shipping noise in the southwest indian ocean (swio) funded by the french govt agency ffem, and involved two expeditions to cross the mozambique channel in a sailing vessel to deploy and recover remote acoustic recorders. We also conducted an omura's whales research expedition off the northwest coast of madagascar surveying approximately 400 km of coast in a sailing vessel. The ceteceans program leader co-supervised three phd students enrolled at curtin university - mauritius campus, on the acoustic ecology of blue whales, humpback whales and sperm whales in the swio. The leader also attended and presented work at the bienial meeting of the scientific committee of the international whaling commission in bled, slovenia.

The african chelonian institute (aci) led surveys to document sea turtle poaching and bycatch in mbodiene and joal, senegal in partnership with the joal-fadiouth marine protected area. Aci held the fourth national sea turtle awareness days for senegal at national park of langue de barbarie near saint-louis over four days. The event included an official ceremony, awareness activities, educational displays and beach clean ups at three sites. It was attended by over 1500 participants. Four sea turtle nests at ngazobil were monitored. A temporary turtle facility was maintained in ngazobil. On the new aci land for the permanent facility, a well has been dug and an access road was cleared. Tomas worked with a canadian film crew at koyli alpha preserve to film a tv documentary named survival of the slowest.

The senegal stranding network conducted nine coastal stranding surveys, including monthly surveys from may-october. We also responded to carcasses outside of surveys throughout the year. We documented 186 stranded cetaceans and 182 stranded sea turtles (most were sampled for genetics, taxonomy and other data collection). We partnered with colleagues from the smithsonian museum of natural history for cetacean taxonomy and genetics studies. We also analyzed stranding data collected since 2014 and continued writing a manuscript for scientific publication. Other programs