Each week, we feature a worthy citizen science project or nature news segment from around the nation. This week is Happywhale.
We learned about Happywhale and its co-founder, Ted Cheeseman, through our program, The Whale Detective. Ted was one of many scientists and citizen scientists who helped our host, Tom Mustill, identify the whale who breached on him.
Happywhale’s mission is simple: to “inspire kinship between humans and marine life through whale citizen science.” They hope to be able to identify every whale in the sea through people’s contributions.
The team makes participating easy: people can submit photos to the website for the team to identify and track, sift through whale photos to mark whale tails or answer “yes” or “no” questions to help ID the whales. Through citizen science efforts and state-of-the-art image processing algorithms, Happywhale now has a database of more than 200,000 whale photos, with more than 30,000 individual whales identified.
Learn more about whale ecotourism at their website, and let us know your favorite marine citizen science project in the comments below!
Here’s a bonus picture of Prime Suspect, the whale featured in The Whale Detective:
Prime Suspect courtesy of Happywhale
More whale-based citizen science projects: