'Facebook for whales' is helping this researcher catalogue whale populations across the globe

One scientist is calling for people to take out their cameras and zoom into the backside of whales to help build a worldwide catalogue that can track whale populations.

HappyWhale is a science web platform where people upload photos of the underside of whale tails, which have unique markers that make it possible to identify individual whales and then track them.

"In an absolute nutshell, you could think of it a bit like Facebook for whales. But the heart of it is, we use machine learning, image recognition — artificial intelligence — to determine who a whale is," director Ted Cheeseman told CBC News.

Cheeseman said people submit photos to HappyWhale's website of the whale tails, or flukes, which are unique to the individual whale and are used to track the mammals through a growing database.

"Take a picture of the whale's tail while it's diving, and when that tail lifts … it shows the underside of the surface of the tail. There are features — patterns and the trailing edge and shape of the tail — that are like a fingerprint or like a face. And we can identify the individual from that."

An algorithm examines submitted photos and determines whether the whale is in the system already. Someone in the organization will also confirm the match with their own eyes.

"So if I look at all in Newfoundland, in our database there's 2,724 whales in there, and the data stretches from 1972 to [today]," said Cheeseman.

Whale watchers along the coast of Newfoundland this time of year are more likely to see humpback whales feeding along the shores, he said.

While there are electronic tags that can track whales, he says, they don't stay fixed on the animal for long.

"Maybe a month, maybe if you're really lucky, four or five, six months. But this tail pattern is with the whale for their entire life."

A humpback whale first photographed in 1972 was recently spotted in Alaska, Cheeseman said. As far as they know, he added, he's the world's oldest humpback whale.

"The biologists who photographed him actually texted me right away, super-excited, 'I just saw Old Timer!'" said Cheeseman.

"To me, there's a science story in there, but there's also a personal story and that's meaningful."

Data reveals numbers

Cheeseman, who is a PhD candidate at Southern Cross University studying whales in the North Pacific, said he used the HappyWhale database in his research.

"We have identified almost every living [humpback] whale in the North Pacific," he said, "and from that we've been able to make, basically, a census of population estimates."

Prior to HappyWhale's database, past population estimates had been calculated in the 1990s and 2000s. Happy Whale was able to take the largest data set by creating a model that looked at population year by year as opposed to every 15 years.

"Now we can update it every year and we can turn around and say, 'Oh, OK, great. Now we have this new data' — which itself is important."

The data has revealed new information, Cheeseman said, pointing to an article he co-wrote, published by the Royal Society Open Science journal in February, that found a marine heat wave that hit the northeastern Pacific in 2014 to 2015 caused a whale population drop.

"That was unknown. We knew that some whales were unhealthy because of it. We knew that some whales died from it, but we didn't know the scale of it."

Cheeseman said having this information changes people's relationship with the ocean and betters our understanding of  whales.

"That's really what we're after: it's learning more, not having it out of sight, out of mind," he said. "We are a part of their environment, and they are a part of ours."

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