Photo credit: Massimiliano Rosso
We’re in a documentary!
By Diane Esson, June 2025
A new ‘Changing Seas’ episode dives into the global plastic pollution problem, and how it’s affecting the waters and wildlife around Madeira. And we’re in it!
Last October, our team welcomed the Changing Seas crew to film an episode about the growing threat of plastic pollution in the waters surrounding the Madeira Archipelago. Changing Seas, a public television series produced by South Florida PBS in the USA, has been exploring pressing environmental issues and insights from marine research since 2009. Now in its seventeenth season, the documentary is featuring research in Madeira in its episode ‘Whales in a Plastic Ocean’ — exploring how plastic affects deep-diving cetaceans, how it arrives to our waters and what we can do to reduce its impact.
On June 25, 2025*, this episode is being released to the world! ‘Whales in a Plastic Ocean’ highlights the work of our researchers at MARE-Madeira, in collaboration with the Regional Directorate of the Environment and Sea, so you’ll see the familiar faces of MARE-Madeira researchers Filipe Alves, Ana Dinis, Annalisa Sambolino, Laura Redaelli, Marc Fernandez Morrón, Sílvia Almeida and Rita Ferreira; MARE-Madeira Director João Canning-Clode; and MARE-Madeira collaborator Pedro Sepúlveda (Director of Services at the Regional Directorate of the Environment and Sea). The program includes insights from several of our EU- and Interreg-funded projects: Project MIMA, which studies how plastics behave in deep-sea environments and affect predator-prey interactions; CleanAtlantic, which improves marine litter monitoring and removal systems across the Atlantic region; and FreeLitterAT, which promotes litter-free coastal communities through prevention, cleanup, and stakeholder engagement.
The Changing Seas crew with us in Madeira!
Based on recent research ranging from acoustic analysis of deep-sea plastics to predictive modeling of marine litter hotspots, our researchers explain the growing pressures plastic pollution places on ocean ecosystems, and show how science can inform better policies and more effective public engagement. Although the episode is focused in Madeira, we also reveal how interconnected this problem is, and how our ability to successfully address it needs international collaboration.
This creative collaboration with Changing Seas may not have happened without the Ma’at Environment Fund, supporters of our digital storytelling and Youth Ambassadors program and long-standing advisors. The Ma’at Environment Fund’s directors had the foresight to introduce us to the Changing Seas team, helping us take this next step in sharing MARE-Madeira’s research with international audiences.
The episode will be freely available globally, with Portuguese subtitles, on YouTube and the Changing Seas website. If you’re based in Madeira, join us for our local screening on Monday, June 30 at 6:30pm at Madeira Tecnopolo! Our researchers will be present for an interview afterwards, and we’ll have some activities to help bring our research from the episode to life. We hope to see you there!
*The episode will be released in the US at 8pm EDT on June 25/ 1am WET on June 26.
