More than 160 experts on cetaceans will meet this weekend at the Science Park of the University of Valencia to celebrate the 10th National Congress of the Spanish Society of Cetaceans, a non-profit organisation that promotes the protection of mammals, turtles and the marine environment in general, through training and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The symposium is organised by the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (ICBiBE).
X SEC 2017
The conference deals with the main researching lines and the last advances in this field. With a total of 54 presentations, the schedule includes topics such as health, physiology or parasitology as well as the conservation and the fauna related to cetaceans and marine turtles, the cetacean acoustic communications, the beaching and the distribution map of this kind of mammals.
The congress will open on Friday, 29th September, at 15:30, in the Marie Curie Auditorium. The people in charge of the inauguration will be the director of the Scientific Park, Juan Antonio Raga, on behalf of the Principal of the Universitat de València; the counsellor of Agriculture, Environment, Climate Change and Rural Development Department, Elena Cebrián; the president of the Spanish Society of Cetaceans (SEC), Camilo Saavedra (Spanish Institute for Oceanography); the Dean of the Faculty for Biological Sciences, Javier Lluch, and the director of the Cavanilles Institute, Juan Monrós.
There will be two inaugural conferences, ‘Cetáceos y parásitos: hacia una perspectiva biológica integral’ (Cetaceans and parasites: towards an integral biological perspective) by Francisco Javier Aznar (Unidad de Zoología Marina-ICBiBE) and another one by Victoria González (Fundación Biodiversidad), who presents the project Life IP Intermares, the greatest initiative of preservation of the marine environment in Europe, which is coordinated by the Ministry of Agriculture, fishing, feeding and environment through the Fundación Biodiversidad.
During the meeting, which ends on Saturday afternoon with the General Assembly of SEC, the multiplatform 'Tortugas Oceanógrafas’, which aims to follow large pelagic predators (far from the coast) with submarine drones, will be presented. The results of the INDICIT project on the environmental state of the European marine environment and in particular on marine litter and plastics in the food webs will also be presented. Ten European R&D centres, among them the Cavanilles Institute of Universitat de València, take part in this project.
The congress has the collaboration of the Valencian Department for Agriculture, Environment, Climate Change and Rural Development of the Valencian Government, the Official College of Veterinarians of Valencia and the Oceanographic of Valencia.