Season’s Greetings and Happy 2025!

H O L Y mackerel!…

What a year this was!

Three trips to Gdynia, in Poland. Three trips to Al Hoceima, in Morocco. And one trip that had us driving captive bred bluefin tuna from Mazarrón (Spain) to Hirtshals (Denmark), then captive bred sharks to Vienna (Austria), back to Hirtshals, then wild caught codfish to Ílhavo (Portugal), with a quick jump to Galway (Ireland), and back to Vila Real (Portugal) loaded with captive bred salmon, before returning home with 13.800 km under our belts in 10 days.

2024 was also the year when…

• We formally finished our “Mobile Station” project, funded by the EEA Grants, on the 30th of April and we are now doing some post-project fine-tuning, before we hit the road in January 2025!
• We became distributors of Blue Shark Journey products, and we fully intend to stock everyone’s shelves with their awesome Triage, Colony, Paradigm, and other incredibly effective chemicals, most of which regular “weapons” in our long-term transport arsenal.
• We did three jobs with our sister company TechAquarium, and dazzled more clients with our unparalleled acrylic polishing technique, which releases ZERO residue to the surrounding water and is completely silent. Feel free to reach out to Parc Zoologique de Paris, Sea Life Oberhausen, Den Bla Planet, Sea Life Blankenberge, and the Oceanário de Lisboa, where we’ve done no less than THREE jobs thus far, and ask them how they feel about the flawless service we provided.
• We successfully collected and transported Sardina pilchardus for the first time, safely delivering 500 individuals to the Al Hoceima Aquarium in Morocco.
• We donated over 6.000 euros in grants from our Humanitarian & Research Funds, which surpassed 100.000 euros in the Summer of 2023! We also realized that we became far too popular within the young students community, so we had to make things a bit more formal.
• We turned 18 years old on the 1st of September, and what a ride it’s been since that distant 2006 and our very first order, consisting of a Mobula mobular delivered to L’Oceanogràfic de València.
• We also rescued a Galeorhinus galeus that was trapped in a Lagoon, which got us monster media coverage!
• We attended the International Aquarium Congress in Guadalajara, the BIAZA NAC Ectotherms Conference at Drayton Manor, and the European Union of Aquarium Curators meeting in Rotterdam, where we delivered a total of five talks, including…
• …our very first venture into Mobile Phone serious Games, which is something you will hear A LOT about in 2025!
• We reintroduced to the Azorean ocean three more rescued sea-turtles, which now makes a total of 5 animals successfully imported from the UK and EU, and safely delivered to Azorean waters… and some 80 more rescued locally from Azorean islands!
• We expanded our collections to the Western side of Algarve, on our southern continental shore, thus ensuring an even wider list of species is now available. Drop us a line for a complete list of available critters.
• And we finished the year big with the publication of “The global status of sharks, rays, and chimaeras“, which had significant contributions from our staff.

Whoa! That’s a pretty big list… And we didn’t even mention that 2024 brought us our best financial results ever and saw our brand new Instagram account surpass 1.000 followers and our Facebook account reach 6.000.

Anyway, who cares about “likes” when you’re driving captive bred Thunnus thynnus over 3.000 km, for the first time EVER in History, and facing customs clearance times of 14,5 hours in Tangiers!…

Not us, that’s for sure, which is why it often takes us weeks to update our adventures on social media, but the team is growing steadily, so hopefully we’ll become better at that next year.

And that’s who our final word goes to this year: our team. We had some serious challenges and had to say goodbye to a couple of members, but we also welcomed fresh souls who already proved their dedication and ability above and beyond!

In summary, we couldn’t have done all this if it weren’t for our kickass team, so here are their names, because they really are the heart of Flying Sharks and we are indebted to them beyond words: Beatriz Silva, Diogo Costa, Estevão Simonka, Inês Gaspar, Gabriel Dutra, Ivan Beltran, João Correia, José Marques, Leonel Gonçalves, Miguel Antunes, Nuno Rodrigues, Rui Guedes, and Telmo Morato.

You all rock like no other and we wish our clients, partners, suppliers and friends a spectacular 2025! We’d love to share what we already have planned for 2025 but it’s bad luck to brag before the chicken is in the pot, so you’ll just have to wait for the next Newsletter which, if all goes well, we’ll be written from a place far, far away… But still on this galaxy.

Peace!

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