Name: Researchers use A.I. to protect whale sharks from extinction
Uploaded: 2022-11-01
Duration: 5 min 53 s
Description: WildMe's A.I. technology helps researchers in the Galápagos Islands track and protect whale sharks.

WildMe's A.I. technology helps researchers in the Galápagos Islands track and protect whale sharks.

Researchers use A.I. to protect whale sharks from extinction 

Tech

Researchers use A.I. to protect 'endangered' whale sharks

if you protect sharks you protect the ocean and if you protect the ocean you have a healthy planet. Ai Technology allows researchers across the globe to tag and track individual animals, study their population and come up with new strategies to prevent extinction. Hi my name is Jason Holmberg. I'm the executive director of a unique non profit organization called Wild Meat. One of our projects is called Shark Book in which we help researchers track individually identify and monitor the populations of different shark species across the globe. My background is in engineering and it was on a research expedition to Mexico. Sitting with this biologist bobbing up and down in the water waiting for a whale shark to show up that I had conversations about. Well how effective is it to physically tag these animals? Which turned out to be 1% effective as a person with an engineering background. When I hear that something is 1% effective, I guarantee you I can get you to 2% or 5% or 10%. Unfortunately in 2016 are whale sharks were downgraded from vulnerable to endangered on the I. U. C. N. Reds. It's because of many anthropogenic impacts amongst these. We have industrial fisheries. Both targeted fisheries towards whale sharks and then whale sharks falling prey as bycatch in gill nets and then we have other problems like vessel strikes. Green pollution and climate changes that are affecting this species. We need sharks in our oceans because of what they mean to the balance of the ecosystem as top predators they feed on the weak, they feed on the sick. And by doing so keep the food chain in order. You cannot save a species if you don't understand how they behave. The Galapagos whale shark project works mainly up in the island of Darwin where we have adult female whale sharks not seen almost anywhere else in the world crossing by seasonally. Our goal is to study the species. To understand their psychology, their movements, their behavior to be able to protect the species from extinction. A species like the whale shark can live somewhere between 60 and 120 years. We don't honestly know there are two westerns Which means that data we collect now will still have relevant potentially 60 years from now. And that really reinforces the need to reliably re identify these individuals because we're gonna be tracking them literally over generations of research. So one way to protect them if you track individual whale sharks and when they appear and when they disappear you get a sense of how many animals are there. Or at least you can create statistical models to predict that. You can look at the population trajectory. Is this population growing or getting smaller? And is that bad or good. We do this two ways we have active tracking where we place satellite tags on a whale shark and we can follow their movement through the ocean. And then we have passive tracking. It works through photo I. D. So now rather than sticking a spear in the shark which could cause infection and potentially even death crisis. We are able to safely and non invasively take a picture of a whale shark without getting in its way without disturbing its feeding or its travel with photo ID. We managed to passively track non intrusively track whale sharks around the world. And the best thing is you don't even have to be a scientist to be able to work in the protection of whale sharks through this manner. Every single person that goes down into the ocean nowadays has a GoPro a camera. Everyone's taking photos of these animals by doing so we can use these photos, analyze the patterns of the whale sharks which are unique to every single whale sharks just like your thumb prints. And we can use it to identify this whale shark and see if it's popping up elsewhere in the world. Each whale shark has this constellation of spots on the left and the right side and each of these left and right sides are unique to each individual whale shark, much like my left thumb print and my right thumb print interestingly enough up until this year, most of the whale sharks we uploaded onto the shark books were categorized as new individuals. They had never been spotted around the world before. However, we're finally reaching a point where we have enough individuals categorized that we're starting to see matches and this is allowing us to see all the different population indices like mortality rates, residency times and then how frequently they visit this area. That's the power of citizen science. There are people observing the natural world in places that it's not scalable, cost effective or not even thought to be for the research community. It can encompass everyone. Ai technology allows researchers to tag and track individual animals migrating across the globe using only photographs, which means not only can these photographs be collected as part of structured research, but we can actually look at social media and public participation to help us prevent the extinction of wildlife across the globe. Last year we managed to have a very, very special match. A whale sharks came back after 13 years of having been seen for the first time. So this tells us the whale sharks coming here are not the same whale sharks. Year after year. Instead they're coming back after 2459 and 13 years. And this for us bring the story of hope because it shows us that even the whale sharks migrate overprotective ocean. Some of them are able to survive the anthropogenic press