In 1981, Vice-Admiral Ibsen de Gusmão Câmara, one of the leaders in the fight against the continuation of whaling in Brazil (practised until 1985 by Japanese settlers in Paraíba), began, on his own initiative, to investigate reports from fishermen and visitors to the Santa Catarina coast claiming that ‘black whales’ were appearing sporadically on the southern coast of Brazil, and organised a group of volunteers to search the coasts of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná with very few resources obtained externally, to carrying out not only direct observations of the coast but also interviews with local communities that could shed more light on the identity of the animal in question.
As early as 1981, these interviews indicated the recent regular presence of ‘black whales’ with calves. As the search continued, in August 1982 the sighting of an adult female and her calf on Ubatuba beach, São Francisco do Sul Island, SC, and several other subsequent observations of mother and calf pairs in the same year confirmed the status of the Santa Catarina coast as an active breeding area for right whales in Brazil.
An analysis of the sightings recorded over more than twenty years of continuous activity shows the existence of a clearly marked area of concentration, located between Santa Catarina Island and Cape Santa Marta, on the coast of Santa Catarina, where aerial surveys in collaboration with land-based sightings determined the area of greatest seasonal concentration of the animals. Over the following years, starting in 1982, the activities of what was then known as the Southern Right Whale Project continued, whose fundamental objective, unchanged to this day, is to guarantee the survival and population recovery of the right whale in Brazilian waters.
Since its foundation, the Australis Institute has incorporated the activities of the Southern Right Whale Research and Conservation Programme (PPCBF), created in 1982, including its database collection with information from almost four decades of monitoring the species, as well as the bank of aquatic mammal tissue samples from strandings.
The Australis Institute also works with the Ministry of the Environment on activities related to developing and revising the National Action Plan for the Conservation of Cetaceans, the Protocols for Attending to Cetacean Strandings and Entanglements, and revising the National and State Threatened Species Lists for Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. The Institute is also part of the Marine Mammal Stranding Assistance Networks in Brazil (REMAB).
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