Every tail tells a story: how citizen scientists help track the world’s whales
Do you know that every whale has distinctive markings on its tail?
Do you know that scientists are using these unique markings to track whales?
Do you know that in the 20th century, nearly 3 million whales were killed by people?
Do you know what dangers whales are facing today?
In August 2018, Ted Cheeseman, co-founder of happywhale.com, answered these thought-provoking questions in a talk at the Bay Model Visitor Center in Sausalito, California. Slide after slide, Ted showed the audience images of whale tails, each with unique features that can be used like “fingerprints” to identify individual whales. The images had been uploaded to the website by citizen scientists from around the world. As Ted pointed out, the markings on each whale’s tail come from natural causes such as the whale’s own skin pigmentation, wounds from orca attacks, barnacles, hazards created by humans such as ship strikes and fishing nets, or any combination of these.
With modern image processing, scientists can now track individual whales by the unique features on their tails, following their migrations and gaining a better understanding of their habits and behavior. Because there are only a limited number of scientists to follow so many whales constantly on the move, Ted and Ken Southerland founded happywhale.com in 2015 to invite the public to take part in whale tracking. When an image of a whale’s tail is submitted to the website, a person or a computer tries to identify the whale. Once it is identified, photos of that whale taken in different places help map out its migration routes.
Since the website launched in 2015, it has processed more than 114,000 photos, recorded 31,000 encounters, and identified 16,000 individual whales as of the end of August 2018.
At the time, Ted’s team could identify whales by eye with about 90% accuracy, while identification by computer was around 70% accurate. Ted hoped to bring the computer’s accuracy up to the level of the human eye, and with help from Google and Kaggle, that goal seemed within reach.
Ted also explained that over the past century, the booming whaling industry reduced the total population of whales by 80 to 90%. In light of this daunting fact, he created his site to track the remaining whales, especially humpback whales, and to document their migration routes so that people can monitor their well-being and help their populations recover.
Ted is no stranger to wildlife. He has been traveling and photographing animals since he was a child. For two decades, he has led expeditions to remote parts of the world with Cheesemans’ Ecology Safaris, the company his parents founded almost 40 years ago.
“Why whales?” I asked Ted when I had the chance to interview him a few days after his informative and touching talk. His answer went back to an unforgettable experience 25 years earlier: his first encounter with what was then a very rare whale in Antarctica. Although the number of whales returning to Antarctica has grown considerably since then, he still vividly remembers that encounter. He felt he could do more for whales than take photos of them and hang them on the wall.
His desire to help whales grew especially strong after a humpback whale named Scarlet was photographed in August 2016 off Newport Beach, California. She was tangled in fishing line that wrapped around her pectoral fin and caught in her mouth. The photo caused an uproar and drew wide public attention. People were relieved when Scarlet finally freed herself from the gear after a long struggle. A few months later, however, she was found dead, her health ruined by the entanglement; her dark flanks had turned bright crimson from an infestation of whale lice. The story of Scarlet’s brave struggle and tragic death moved many people. Ted felt that those photos spoke “a thousand words” and became an important way to raise awareness of the human-made dangers whales face in the ocean every day.
Of those dangers, the most life-threatening for whales are ship strikes and entanglement in fishing lines. Most fishing lines are nearly unbreakable, and when attached to crab pots they can create thousands of pounds of drag. When a whale hits a line, it tends to turn, tying a knot that is very hard to remove. Imagine a whale caught that way. Imagine ourselves tangled in the same way, with no hands or tools to free ourselves! In 2016 alone, 71 whale entanglements were reported on the US West Coast, but Ted estimates that these represent only about 10% of the actual number. “There is so much scarring on the whales,” Ted lamented. He hopes his site can serve as a bridge to the public, helping people engage with the lives of whales and learn to respect and protect them.
After the interview, I began to reflect on the impact we humans have had on whales. Over the span of a single century, an industry systematically hunted and killed nearly 3 million of these peaceful creatures. Now we have people like Ted taking on the monumental task of helping their numbers recover. We can never do too much to raise public awareness and support these efforts, and I hope more and more of us will lend our support and resources to help Ted fulfill his mission.