Volunteer
Contribute to our efforts
A life-changing experience
Looking back on our volunteer program
In 2017, with our partner Mada Megafauna, we took the initiative to welcome volunteers in the team. Offering this opportunity meant we could expand our data collection efforts, with more trained citizen scientists collecting photo-identification pictures of whale sharks, while at the same time opening the doors of our scientific programme to the public, and enabling a wider range of people (not scientists!) to contribute to whale shark research, and ultimately, conservation.
We created a new programme from scratch, with training days including freediving training, data collection and processing, to ensure our volunteers could actually collect usable data. Spread over a short period; 18 days, this meant anyone with a job could join. We thoughtfully selected and interviewed our candidates, to match the reality of the field, and picked French speakers to promote inclusion with our local teams. Our desire to offer an authentic, human-sized experience to our volunteers coming to Madagascar represents a signifiant investment of time and energy, which we have always wanted to honour as best as we could.
Bonds, friendships, relationships, have been forged, and many have come back to visit, volunteer again or got further involved in the project’s growth. Together, we all participated to a colossal effort since 2017 to monitor the whale shark population together, regardless of our different nationalities, sex, beliefs or jobs.
Together we have collected 2 096 identification photos!
After 7 years, sadly this adventure came to an end in 2024.
With a declining population, we wanted to further reduce our impact on the whale shark population, with fewer animals we get a lot of redundant data, yet still cause disturbance by collecting data from tourism boats. Even though no data still is data, unrealistic expectations made us rethink what one could expect over 18 days in the field.
Moreover, more than ever, we want to focus on training and empowering locals to eventually collect data directly.
We thank all our volunteers for their trust, enthusiasm, energy and curiosity. We will miss you!