AI Photo Analysis Reveals 20% Drop in Pacific Humpback Whales Since 2012 Peak
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Researchers used AI photo recognition to analyze over 200,000 whale tail images and found a 20% decline in North Pacific humpback whales since 2012. Climate change impacts like ocean warming may be a factor.
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The AI tool matches unique markings on whale tails to identify individual whales, like a fingerprint. This allows more accurate population tracking over time.
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The images come from a nonprofit called HappyWhale that crowdsources whale photos from scientists and citizen scientists to create a large whale tail database.
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Humpback whales were removed from the endangered list in 2016 after rebounding from near extinction, but numbers peaked in 2012 before a recent decline.
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Beyond whales, researchers use similar facial/pattern recognition AI to study population changes in other animal species to aid conservation efforts.