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Issue Date: May 4, 2008
Track sharks with crowdsourcing
You can "catch" a 65-foot-long shark on the Internet.
By Julian Smith
The world's biggest fish gets better known in a "crowdsource" project.
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Every spring, scuba divers head to tropical places such as Honduras and the Philippines to find whale sharks, the biggest fish in the sea. Also sighted occasionally off the coasts of Florida and Puerto Rico, these threatened creatures grow to more than 65 feet long. (They're mostly harmless to humans, as long as you avoid their door-sized fins.)
Despite the whale shark's size, scientists have known little about its numbers, migration routes and breeding habits. Thanks to the Web, that's changing.
A computer programmer, a marine biologist and an astrophysicist have created the Ecocean Whale Shark Photo-identification Library, a Web-based system used for identifying, tracking and potentially protecting the fish, which have "whale" in their name because of their size. Professional shark watchers aren't the only ones who can contribute.
How it works: Anyone -- scientists, divers and eco-tourists -- can upload photos of the sharks to the site (whaleshark.org). Trained volunteers then scan the images for the unique constellation of white spots every whale shark has behind its gills, like a giant fingerprint. Software that originally was developed for the Hubble Space Telescope to identify stars helps find the patterns to track and monitor the sharks in the wild.
Contributors from 37 countries have helped identify and track more than 1,100 whale sharks. You can "adopt" a shark, get updates each time it's "re-sighted" and even offer up your computer's unused processing power to crunch data.
The project already has shown that whale shark numbers have been climbing slowly in western Australia -- a rare bit of good news for the species. Still, "the more data we get, the more questions we have," programmer Jason Holmberg says.
What's next: This "crowdsourcing" approach, which harnesses the Internet's worldwide reach, is a new direction for conservation. This year, the Ecocean team hopes to expand its system to at least one other species with distinctive markings. Next up: polar bears, which have unique whisker patterns.
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