The Living Sailor

Case Study of The Living Sailor Project in Citizen Science Theory and Practice

Read the paper here

Data analysis = 100% complete

Fig. Summary of The Living Sailor data for subjects receiving 4 or more volunteers in agreement and including manually corrected subjects for handedness. Upper left: subjects originated for locations spanning the globe with concentrated efforts in Western North America, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Upper right: the vast majority of subjects were comprised of a single sailor. Bottom left: most subjects were left-handed sailors with comparatively few co-occurrences. Bottom right: most subjects were of live sailors.

Global distribution patterns of an ocean-surface dwelling animal are associated with organismal asymmetry

This pre-print is undergoing peer-review and is not the final product, but we are excited to share the work-in-progress with you all! Read the pre-print here

This work combines your Zooniverse data with at-sea observations inside the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Our data demonstrate that the sail direction influences by-the-wind sailors global distribution! We also looked at their genetics and used oceanographic modeling which combined tell a compelling story that sail direction guides Living Sailor distribution.

Fig. A: Map of iNaturalist observations of Velella velella with the sail direction determined by volunteers on the community science platform Zooniverse (Iwanicki & Helm 2025). B: pie-charts showing the proportion of left (blue) and right (red) Velella velella observations plotted to the location from two sea-going community science expeditions (SEA and The Vortex Swim) to the eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (marked as NPSG).