VulnerableSperm Whale
Physeter macrocephalus
Europe
Gibraltar is a limestone promontory of little more than six square kilometres set at the point where the Mediterranean narrows almost to touch Africa. That position makes it one of the great migratory funnels on the planet: every spring and every autumn, hundreds of thousands of storks, kites, short-toed eagles and honey buzzards gather over the Rock waiting for the right conditions to cross the strait, because soaring birds cannot cover long distances over the sea. The Upper Rock reserve keeps Mediterranean scrub, vertical cliffs and a system of karst caves that shelter bat colonies and in which the last traces of Neanderthal occupation in Europe have been found. Its waters, where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean mix, are highly productive and hold bottlenose and common dolphins resident year-round, as well as serving as a migration route for rorquals and pilot whales.
National animal: The Barbary macaque, the emblematic species of the Rock
The Barbary macaques of the Rock are the only primates living wild in Europe. Tradition holds that if they disappear, Gibraltar will cease to be British, and in 1942, when the population had fallen to a handful of animals, Churchill ordered new macaques to be brought from North Africa to reinforce it. Today there are several hundred, censused and monitored individually.
Feeding of the macaques by visitors has altered their behaviour and their diet, and has made it necessary to ban it and to manage the groups that come down into the town. The Strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, a permanent risk to the resident cetaceans.
The Upper Rock year-round for macaques and swifts. The Strait between August and October for the migration of raptors and storks. The bay in summer for dolphins and rorquals.
157 species found
Based on what we already know about Gibraltar.
