How citizen scientists are uncovering the secret lives of blue whales

For about two months each year, fisherman Faustino Mauloko da Cunha transforms his home along the South Pacific coast into a whale monitoring station.

From the morning, villagers and student volunteers gather at the house in Subaun, a village in the north of Timor-Leste. Armed with binoculars and telephoto cameras, they watch the cobalt waters for one of its great treasures - pygmy blue whales.

When there is a sighting, it’s all systems go.

Faustino's son, Zacarias, dispatches a drone. Then the team’s leader, Australian marine ecologist Karen Edyvane, guides him to take the best photographs. When the drone returns, the team reviews the pictures, taking notes on a white board.

It's a small and thrifty operation in Timor-Leste, which is part of an archipelago that lies between South East Asia and the South Pacific. But it has generated a wealth of information about pygmy blue whales - one of the largest animals on earth, whose vast habitats and elusive nature make them challenging to study.

These citizen science researchers, all of them locals, have spotted nearly 3,000 pygmy blue whales over the past 10 years - Prof Edyvane considers that a “truly extraordinary” number.

Timor-Leste has one of the world’s highest concentrations of marine mammals.

During the migration season - October and November - hundreds of pygmy blue whales pass through the country’s waters as they make the epic journey spanning thousands of kilometres from the Banda Sea, which lies to the north of Timor-Leste, to southern Australia.

But the area has been under-researched, says Prof Edyvane, who started the citizen science monitoring programme in 2014.

During the last two whale seasons, she has based herself in Subaun, about 50km (31 miles) from the capital Dili, working with fishermen, students and dive tour operators to document the cetaceans.

They have documented "some of the lesser known, intimate reproductive behaviours of blue whales, some for the very first time," says Prof Edyvane, a researcher at Charles Darwin University and Australian National University.

In 2022, for instance, tourists with a local tour operator invovlved in the programme captured underwater footage of a mother nursing her calf, offering a glimpse into the species’ reproductive behaviours, which have remained largely unknown.

"It’s very, very exciting,” she adds.

The programme started as a Facebook group, inviting local tour operators, fishermen and residents to share sightings of cetaceans.

Prof Edyvane trained them on surveying methods and taught them how to use telephoto cameras and drones so that they could conduct aerial and boat surveys.

“When locals see the whales swimming by, they will post pictures on Facebook and WhatsApp. Updates come on a real-time basis and when someone shares something, everyone gets very excited,” Prof Edyvane says.

In 2016, the team worked with a dive tour operator to launch the first whale-watching tour.

It was only last year that they set up a “research station” outside the da Cunha’s village home - photos show a simple hut overlooking the bay. Outside are two tables, plastic chairs and white boards mounted on the hut's walls.