No humans, no radar: how AI protects orcas in British Columbia
Keeping track of hundreds of orcas is being made simpler with the help of an AI algorithm that can identify individual killer whales with 92% accuracy.
Orcas, or killer whales, are an apex predator in the world’s oceans. As such they face the problem of accumulating harmful contaminants in their blubber that affect their health and the survival rate of their offspring.
In order to better track the orca population, researchers at Bay Cetology in British Columbia in affiliation with Alexander Barnhill at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Germany have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm called Finwave which can identify marine animals based on their dorsal fin and other identifying markers. Furthermore, the public is invited to contribute their own photos to help with the endeavor.
“The model creates a mental map of all the features of an individual,” said Jared Towers scientist and executive director of Bay Cetology, speaking to Encyclopedia of Puget Sound. “It is accurate in most cases — about 92 percent accurate.”
How AI is protecting orcas in British Columbia
Towers’ research focuses on Bigg’s killer whales, which are also known as transients, that traverse large areas of the North Pacific Ocean. Unlike resident orcas, which eat fish, transients are mammal eaters, preying on seals, porpoises, dolphins, sea lions and occasionally whales.
Because these creatures are higher in the food chain they have higher concentrations of harmful contaminants from industrial pollutants in the water. That results in bioaccumulation of toxins cumulating in the Bigg’s killer whale making them “some of the most toxic animals on the planet,” according to Towers.
Using Finwave to speed up identification of the orcas off the coast of British Columbia allows researchers to apply other analytical tools to look at specific parameters such as calf mortality to judge the health of the orca pods.
“What we are finding so far is that individuals that are getting a higher dose of contaminants from mom seem to have an increased risk of mortality before age three,” explained Chloe Kotik, a Phd candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who works with Towers, on CNN’s Call to Earth.
She says that her hope is to use the data to quantify some of the effects that contaminants are having these marine mammals to provide evidence for how human activity is affecting them. “And that might motivate us to clean up our act,” Kotik added.
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