The Tethys Research Institute (official name: Istituto Tethys ONLUS) is a non-profit research organisation founded in 1986 to support marine conservation through science and public awareness and by participating in the international conservation process. Tethys' activities are mainly carried out in the Mediterranean Sea, although research programmes have been conducted also in the Black Sea, the North Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, the Red Sea and Antarctica. The results of these activities have been presented in scientific publications as well as in meetings, workshops and conferences.
Mission statement Tethys' mission is the conservation of the marine environment and its biodiversity, by supporting national and international marine conservation policies and processes with robust scientific knowledge, and by developing, promoting and implementing public awareness and education activities.
History The Tethys Research Institute was founded in Milan, Italy, on 31 January 1986 by marine ecologist Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara and Egidio Gavazzi, at the time the publisher of the Italian magazine AQVA. The organisation's name was inspired by a figure of Greek mythology, the sea goddess Tethys, daughter of Uranus and Gaia and wife of Oceanus. The Mediterranean Sea is the modern remnant of the prehistoric Tethys Ocean. Since 1995 the institute's headquarters have been established in the premises of the Civic Aquarium of Milan, on the basis of an agreement with the City Council. Since its foundation, Tethys has promoted research activities on marine mammals, such as cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and the endangered Mediterranean monk seal, although investigations have also extended to devil rays and sea turtles. Over more than three decades of work, Tethys has generated one of the largest datasets on Mediterranean cetaceans. Tethys shares its data with the scientific community and policy makers through several open access platforms such as OBIS, OBIS-SEAMAP, GBIF, EMODNET, and INTERCET.
Research programmes and techniques Research methods include distance sampling surveys (both from aircraft, drones and vessels) capture-recapture techniques based on long-term photo-identification to estimate population abundance; habitat and distribution time-series studies inclusive of the collection of remotely sensed environmental covariates, bioacoustics, behavioural sampling, remote biopsy sampling for genetic and toxicological analyses, passive tracking techniques, as well as radio and satellite telemetry. Since 1987 Tethys has been carrying out cetacean surveys in the waters surrounding Italy and adjacent countries. Early boat-based surveys generated the first estimate of relative abundance in the central Mediterranean Sea highlighting the great importance of the Ligurian Sea for whales and dolphins, in comparison to other sectors of the Mediterranean. This was the first indication of the need for the establishment of a cetacean protected area in the North -Western Mediterranean, leading to the proposition of an international sanctuary there, the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals. Since 2009, Tethys has carried out a series of seasonal aerial surveys funded by the Italian Ministry of the Environment and Protection of Land and Sea (MATTM), in cooperation with the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), to estimate the density and abundance, and monitoring the distribution of cetaceans and other marine mega-vertebrates in the seas around Italy. The surveyed areas included the Ligurian Sea, the Central and Southern Tyrrhenian Sea, portions of the Seas of Corsica and Sardinia, as well as the Ionian Sea and the Gulf of Taranto. Research is focussed also on collisions between whales and large ships in the Mediterranean and especially in the Pelagos Sanctuary. A study financed by the Permanent Secretariat of the Pelagos Agreement and published in September 2020 (Proposal to develop and evaluate mitigation strategies to reduce the risk of ship strikes to fin and sperm whales in the Pelagos Sanctuary) was carried out in collaboration with British Antarctic Survey, International Fund for Animal Welfare, QuietOceans, Souffleurs d'Ecume, WWF France. Tethys is also a partner in LIFE-SEADETECT, a European collaborative project aimed at reducing the issue of collisions with marine mammals (2022–2026).
Long-term research projects
Adriatic Dolphin Project Tethys has implemented long-term research programmes on Mediterranean marine mammals. The oldest of these, the Adriatic Dolphin Project (ADP), based on the island of Lošinj (Croatia), was run by Tethys from 1987 to 1999, and produced a large body of substantive ecological knowledge on the local population of common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Concern for the survival of this dolphin population, threatened mainly by a very high level of small vessel traffic during summer, prompted the institute to propose the establishment of a local dolphin protected area. Upon the decision by Tethys to terminate the ADP in 1999, the baton of the scientific and conservation work on the local dolphins was passed to former ADP researchers, founders and co-founders of the Blue World Institute, a Croatian NGO.
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