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About us

It started with
one kid and
one orca.

Club Foca is a school club, not a company or a charity. There's no office and no budget. There is a lot of reading, a growing pile of facts, and a genuine determination to make people care about the animals in this ocean.

Whose idea was this

The founder

Founder & club president

Luca Stefano Finalé Alemán

Luca started Club Foca because he thought it was unfair that most people can name ten kinds of dinosaur and not one kind of seal. He is the reason this club exists, the reason it's called what it's called, and the person who decided the orca had to be the mascot.

His favourite fact, and he will tell you this one unprompted: orca pods are led by the oldest female, and the sons stay with their mother for their entire lives.

Favourite animal
Orca
Runner-up
Narwhal
Role
Founder
Co-founder

Reserved for our
second founding member

Someone else believed in this idea early, and she's helping build the club. Her name goes here as soon as we have her parents' go-ahead to put it on a public website — because that's their call to make, not ours.

?

Coming soon —
with permission.

The story

How a club happens.

  1. How it started

    A kid who could not stop talking about orcas

    It began with one documentary and a very long series of questions nobody in the house could answer. Then came the library books, then the fact that orcas aren't whales, then the fact that a grandmother orca leads the family — and by then it was too late to stop.

  2. The name

    Club Foca — which means Club Seal

    Foca is Spanish for seal, and the club was named before the orca obsession completely took over. Nobody has ever seriously proposed changing it. It's the name. It stays.

  3. Now

    A club, a field guide and a website

    What you're reading is the club's field guide — sixteen marine mammals, written up properly, so anyone at school can look one up and know what they're talking about.

  4. Next

    Getting other people involved

    More members, a beach clean-up, and a talk for the younger years. If you want in, the door is open.

What we stand for

Four rules we actually keep.

01

Facts before feelings

Loving an animal is easy. Knowing it — how it hunts, what it needs, what's actually going wrong — is what lets you help it. We check our sources.

02

Nobody is too young

Every big change started with somebody small deciding it mattered. We're not waiting until we're grown up to care about this.

03

Say it so a kid gets it

If you can't explain it to a seven-year-old, you don't understand it yet. Everything on this site has to pass that test.

04

Small, real, repeatable

One beach cleaned is better than one giant plan nobody does. We pick things we can actually finish.

Questions

Things people ask.

Wait — why is an orca club called Club Foca?
Foca is Spanish for seal. We started out loving all the round, whiskered ones, and the name stuck. Then we fell hard for orcas. Now we cover the whole family: whales, seals, sea lions, walruses, otters and manatees.
Who can join?
Any student at our school. You don't need to know anything about the ocean yet — that's the entire point of the club.
Do I need to be good at science?
Nope. You need to be curious. We'll handle the rest together.
Where do the facts on this site come from?
Mostly NOAA Fisheries, the IUCN Red List, and marine mammal research centres. Conservation statuses change as scientists learn more, so if you spot something out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.
Join Club Foca