Happy Whale: Send us your whale photos, we’ll identify them for fun and for science

[6Foot2]

Link 1: Happywhale

 

Happywhale’s mission is to increase global understanding and caring for marine environments through creating high quality conservation science and education.

 

We aim to make it easy and rewarding for the public to participate in science. How? By building innovative tools to engage anyone interested in marine mammals and serve the research community with powerful collaborative tools.

 

Link 2: WhaleID - Instant Identification for Whales

 

Every whale is unique. For humpback whales, among the most visible and playful whales a whale watcher can see, each individual is recognizable by unique patterns and shapes on their tails (flukes). Since the 1970s scientists have used this as a tool, visually matching each whale in catalogs of thousands of individuals, to track individuals in migrations across oceans and to monitor populations. But visual matching took a long time, often an hour per photo.

 

WhaleID, powered by automated image recognition AI created by Happywhale, brings the power of machine learning to this scientific technique to make it easy and accessible to know every whale with instant matching. This currently works for humpback and sperm whales, with algorithms for other species available here soon.

 

 

What do you need to identify your whale?

 

WhaleID is a scientific tool available via subscription to researchers, naturalist guides and enthusiasts. To get good results, you need:

 

• Quality camera gear: mobile phone photos rarely have enough resolution to show identifying features of a whale. At least a small telephoto lens (minimum 200mm, ideally 100-400mm) is usually necessary.
  
• An internet connection: cell service is usually sufficient to upload an image to our cloud-based image recognition engine. This works well in the field in many locations, but does not work offline.
  
• A subscription to WhaleID:
  

• Personal use: $10/month via Patreon
  
  
• Whale watch operators: $100/month/port - contact us
  
  
• Expedition cruise ship operators: $100/month/ship - contact us
  
  
• Research users: sliding scale – free to $100/month - contact us
  
  

 

With this, you will be able to identify individual humpback whales via photos of their flukes, and access encounter history for any matched whales.

 

Edited August 13, 2023 by 6Foot2
Correct a spelling mistake in the title. :(