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Help us identify individual humpback whales by quality scoring and tagging features like killer whale and ship strike scars in photographs
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About Snapshots at Sea - Whale Identification
About the EY x Zooniverse Collaboration
Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. Through the global EY Ripples collaboration, anyone anywhere can create societal value by contributing to professional research focused on protecting and restoring the environment.
Snapshots at Sea - Whale Identification Overview
Humpback whales are more than giants of the sea, they are ecosystem engineers with complex migratory patterns and intriguing, diverse culture. We can identify individuals by unique persistent shapes and markings in their tails and dorsal fins, an extremely powerful tool for science and a delightful way to follow individuals. Thanks to automated image recognition, matching one whale in a catalog of known individuals now is almost instantaneous, a huge advance over what used to take as much as an hour per image. And with this, the global research and citizen science database Happywhale has collected hundreds of thousands of identified encounters of over 78,000 different humpback whales.
AI image recognition is great at matching patterns but not so good at judging quality and understanding context. So this is where we need your help. With Snapshots at Sea - Whale Identification, we present to you photographs of Humpback whales for you to classify - do you see a fluke (the whale's tail) or a dorsal fin (the fin on the whale's back)? Do you see scarring from a ship strike, a killer whale attack or an entanglement with fishing gear? And how good is the image for matching? Is it sharp, complete, well framed and well presented? Use and improve your observation skills while helping us classify and score photos of these glorious animals.