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Brad
Norman, the founder of the EcOcean whale shark
identification database was recently in
Seychelles
for the CMS Migratory Sharks meeting (see article this
issue). Unfortunately, the CMS meeting was outside the
whale shark monitoring season, which ends on October 30th
and so while Brad was able to meet up with some of the
MCSS team and talk whale sharks and photo identification,
he didn’t get the opportunity to participate in the MCSS
whale shark programme on this visit.
Brad
is the recipient of one of last year’s Rolex Enterprise
awards; this grant is allowing him to travel to various
whale shark areas and meet up with programme leaders and
whale shark tourism operators to get them involved in the
global whale shark photo ID database (see Sagren Vol. 3
no. 4). During his visit to Seychelles he was able to
spend some time with MCSS whale shark programme leader,
David Rowat and explain in more detail how the EcOcean
database can be useful to the Seychelles programme. Photo
IDs from the Seychelles programme have been provided to
the database since its start and during this visit Brad
was able to collect the photo IDs for both 2006 and 2007
and so he now has over 400 new photo IDs to update onto
the database system.
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| The
EcOcean spot matching pattern algorithm at work,
the program is based on thestar field matching
algorithm in the Hubble space telescope. Photo
courtesy EcOcean
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Currently
the EcOcean database has whale shark photo IDs from over
30 countries; photographs of the spot pattern area behind
the gill slits can be submitted on line to the database
where they are processed and compared to all the
other images in the system. These images come from a wide
variety of sources, from dedicated monitoring programmes
such as the MCSS one, to individual snorkellers or divers
who just happen to come across a whale shark
opportunistically. The source of the image is not
important provided that the basic information of the place
and date of the sighting have been recorded. This
‘citizen science’ as Brad and others have termed it,
has allowed for the growth of the EcOcean project
from its origins on the whale sharks off Ningaloo reef,
Western
Australia
.
MCSS
is now able to access the Ecocean site as a Research
Organisation and can update the Seychelles data as needed
although the uploading of each seasons images will be done
en-mass by the staff and volunteers at Ecocean.
You
can read more about the ECOCEAN Whale Shark
Photo-identification Library on their web
site.
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