Whale Shark Identification Project

We just returned from a wonderful trip in the Galapagos. We were on the Sky Dancer and had the opportunity to spend a week with Brad Norman of Ecocean. Brad is a Marine Biologist who is working to track the world's Whale shark population and is using a really cool technology to do so: Identifying the pattern of dots on the side of the shark using some software originally developed to map star patterns in the sky.

I believe that wagsy is aware of this effort, but I have not seen too much on this here on the boards so I promised Brad that I'd post a note on his behalf.

Now, I know we are all concerned about copyright issues on our photos but the great thing about this effort is that it only requires a portion of the shark for id:

It would be great if everyone who has a side shot of any whale shark from any location on any date could upload these to this research site: http://www.whaleshark.org

All that is required is that you know the date and location of the photo. Apparently the resolution isn't that important either. Many images come from P&S cameras.

Mark

And if you do submit photos and they end up being matched with someone else's, you'll get an email that lets you know where and when your shark was sighted elsewhere. Pretty cool.

Just added my sighting to the database.

Utila Whale Shark

I'm thinking they should be able to match it, since the shark was tagged.

There was a mention of ecocean (www.whaleshark.org) on this week's discussion on the Babbage section of The Economist,

under the general topic of citizen science. I got all excited to post about it here, only to find this thread. I guess this is as

good a time as any to bring this thread alive momentarily.

cheers,

Ajay.