WHY THE CCS?

Laura was born and raised in Guadeloupe. Always close to nature and at sea every weekend, she’s always had a fondness for good causes fights.

 

She studied marine biology first at home and then in Belgium and south of France to get a Masters degree in ecology and biodiversity conservation. Starting her firsts experiences in the research field at the CNRS in french Guiana on sea turtles and at the University of Western Australia on sharks and fish-habitat relationships, her interest has then been orientated towards predators interactions with their ecosystems,  intra/interspecies functional ecology and animal behaviour.

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Back to her native island in 2016, she worked for the National Park of Guadeloupe and managed several projects of awareness raising towards local populations and international experts meetings organization. She has worked for several other public institutional organizations (DEAL, SPAW-RAC..) and was nominated as marine ecology expert at the Scientific Council for Regional Natural Heritage (CSRPN).

 

She was then hired at the Agoa sanctuary to work on the building of a marine mammal conservation network in the Caribbean and conducted several international workshops. Falling in love with the purpose and the growing network, she feared the end of the funded project and its beautiful opportunity for caribbean islands connexion.

 

Thanks to some meaningful partnerships and a life changing field mission on sperm whales monitoring in february 2020, she finally took a stand and decided to co-found the Caribbean Cetacean Society NGO, in order to provide a long term, local mainstay for this beautiful and successful cetacean conservation initiative.

Jeffrey grew up in the Caribbean. He started diving at the age of ten thus observing anthropogenic pressure deteriorate his environnement years after years. Doing marine biology was then a mission to be able ​​to protect home.

 

At the age of 16 he built his first project with a team of volunteers to clean all the beaches impacted by the famous “Tours des Yoles”, a cultural event in Martinique, thus removing 12 tones of trash in 1 week.

 

He travelled to Canada and France to obtain a Masters degree in Biodiversity Management and in the Bahamas (Cape Eleuthera Institute), in Australia (Australian Institute of Marine Science) to gain more experience on sharks, rays and turtles. His studies were focused on diversity distribution and assemblages of deep waters sharks, Hidden Markov Models for megafauna tracking, predators role related to risk effects, the importance of environmental variables on fish assemblages and distribution...

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Then he decided to go back to his native region and work for the government at the national park of Guadeloupe. This experience led him to be the scientific coordinator of the Caribbean Marine Mammal Preservation Network (CARI'MAM) project for the Agoa Sanctuary (Office Français pour la Biodiversité, European funded project). His principal missions were to create a network of scientists, to standardize protocols for marine mammal conservation, to organize workshops and training, coordinate scientific campaigns, emulate capacity building and represent the project at international conferences.

 

Wanting to go beyond the governments’ limitations and objectives for marine mammal conservation, he decided to co-create the Caribbean Cetacean Society to ensure the sustainability of this new community created with this network.

 

His dream in the long term is to create a MPA at the Caribbean scale dedicated to megafauna conservation, to better protect these fragile species who can't understand our frontiers.