Did you know you can go on a virtual dive into New Zealand marine reserves and help discover and count our fish species?
Spyfish Aotearoa is a citizen science project between the Department of Conservation (DOC) and charitable organisation Wildlife.AI.
Photo: Monique Ladds
Monique Ladds, who runs the programme, says they want to understand the state of marine reserves around Aotearoa.
“One of the ways that we do that is we have a look at how many fish are inside and outside the reserves and we can look at the ones that were previously harvested, or previously fished, and see if there’s more of them inside the reserves.”
The collaboration with wildlife.ai and citizens helps speed up the process of counting and identifying fish in the videos until machines learn to do so, she says.
“We’re focusing on those common species that we’re really interested in so snapper and blue cod and then we’re training up models to be able to recognise those, so that means once that’s done, we won’t have to count those anymore.
“But it will be ongoing because there are some tricky fish to identify and that’s where we need those citizen scientists to help us out to identify the unique ones or the unusual looking fish that our machine learning models are just never going to be able to recognise.”
The videos are from different marine reserves around the country - Te Tapuwae o Rongokako, Tūhua, Tapuae, and Kāpiti – and can be full of surprises, she says.
“We’ve had one video which had about 35 blue cods, so counting those as they’re moving around can be tricky bit but also be lots and lots of fun.
“We’ve had a big sting ray come through that basically takes up the whole frame of the video which is about two metres across and once he’s in there, there’s not much else coming in.”
“We’re targeting the carnivorous fishes … so the fishes we mostly see are snapper and blue cod but then there’s other things we see that like to eat bait, so we see a lot of lobsters come in and try and get their little paws into the bait pot.
“You see a lot of the hermit crabs come through and we’ve often had the starfish climb on top of the bait pots as well.”
More than 2000 volunteers from around the world have been involved now, she says.
“I’ve actually just been talking with someone this morning who is from Hawaii, who has been jumping on and having a look, comparing their fish to our fish and [they] have been pretty excited with what they’re seen so far.”
It has been encouraging to see more fish inside the marine reserves than outside, she says.
“There’s an indication there’s more fish inside the marine reserve so the protections are actually working for those particular species and we do hope that has flow-on effect to outside the marine reserves as well.”
Spyfish Aotearoa is working with the Science Learning Hub to create resources for schools to provide more information so students can give it a go too.
“It’s super easy to use, you just jump on there, and there’s a little tutorial that pops up straight away, takes just a couple of minutes to read through that and then you’ll be analysing fish before you know it.”
