Apex Cetacea
Apex Cetacea is a research program, a tourism company and a marine wildlife rescue center focusing on the cetaceans of the Capbreton trench in the southwest of France. Their goal is to get a better understand and overview of the population of dolphins and whales that can be found off this coast in order to protect them.
Their main activity resides in ecotourism and to propose days at sea to the public, showing people the richness of the seas of France and educating them about the threats they face. It is thanks to these days at sea that Apex Cetacea can finance its own research missions.
The Capbreton trench is home to many emblematic species of marine mammals such as common dolphins, bottlenose dolphins, pilot whales, and rarer species such as Risso’s dolphins or Minke whales.
This great variety of marine life is due to the upwelling caused by the trench (down to 3000m), bringing cold nutrient waters from the sea bottom and feeding the entire food chain.
But it is this same productivity that makes the area very attractive for industrial fisheries, targeting species such as anchovies or sardines. This collisions between two world leads to many threats for the local biodiversity, especially cetaceans. Each year, up to 15 000 dolphins are thoughts to be caught as bycatches in fishing nets and to die of entanglement. The overfishing of the surrounding seas has also led some species to get closer to the coast, maybe due to the lack of preys offshore.
Apex Cetacea has made his mission and primary goal to investigate these phenomenon and to educate people about this magnificent and yet threatened ecosystem.
I got to work on a short film project with the Apex team and Clément Brouste, its founder, to highlight their mission to reconnect people with marine wildlife. Thanks to this assignment, we got to explore several key topics together such as wildlife tourism, science, marine conservation and other challenges such as fisheries and marine mammals captivity.
