Let your Whale Shark Pictures help Scientists
Researchers studying the gigantic sharks in the Indian Ocean are hoping to use photographs from tourists in the Maldives to track and study their subjects. Essentially, he wanted to know whether our snapshots were good enough to identify a shark. For whale sharks, that means capturing the whale shark’s fingerprint–a specific pattern on its skin, right behind the gills.
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Every year, tourists take approximately a bazillion pictures. Most of those pictures never wind up anywhere but on a hard drive somewhere, never to be seen again, but some might actually be useful. Especially if they’re of whale sharks. Researchers studying the gigantic sharks in the Indian Ocean are hoping to use photographs from tourists in the Maldives to track and study their subjects.
In a study published by the Imperial College of London, researcher Tim Davies looked at hundreds of tourist-taken pictures in order to figure out how reliable they are. Essentially, he wanted to know whether our snapshots were good enough to identify a shark. For whale sharks, that means capturing the whale shark’s fingerprint–a specific pattern on its skin, right behind the gills. Imperial College London summarizes the results:
The study looked at hundreds of images taken by the public, of which many were downloaded from image-sharing websites such as Flickr and YouTube. Individual whale sharks could be successfully identified in 85 per cent of cases, surprisingly close to the 100 per cent identification possible in photographs taken by researchers.
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