Mathilde Martin

Mathilde completed her PhD in early 2023 with an excellent Viva and thesis.  Mathilde also holds a Master degree in Oceanography and Marine Environment from Sorbonne University in Paris. For her Master thesis, she worked with the “Bioacoustics Team” of Paris-Saclay Neurosciences Institute to study mother-young interactions in humpback whales of Madagascar. She worked on the individual vocal signatures in social calls of both mothers and calves as well as the behavioural responses of mother-calf pairs to the playback of male songs. Then she spent 3 months doing fieldwork with in Madagascar during the breeding season of Humpback whales. She was in the research team and on a daily basis, she was responsible for performing biopsies, but also for tagging mother-calf pairs with Acousonde or CATS camera.

 

She is now enrolled at Paris-Saclay University completing a PhD on acoustic communication network in Cape Fur Seals in collaboration with Sea Search Research and Conservation and The Namibian Dolphin Project. Her project is to investigate recognition processes between males, males and females and between mother-pup pairs: ontogeny, occurrence and individual signature and the impact of both noise and plastic pollution on behavior and physiological stress. Four months a year, she is based in Walvis Bay in Namibia to conduct her fieldwork and data collection at Pelican Point seal colony.