Tracking Whale Sharks With Astronomical Algorithms

With the help of algorithms designed to guide the Hubble telescope’s starscape surveys, conservation-minded coders have designed software that helps biologists identify whale sharks by their spots. The program enlists the help of citizens with cameras, and lets researchers track Earth’s biggest fish across time and oceans.

If you put a tag in the whale shark's skin, it wears off or falls away. But using this method scientists can recognize these animals without marking them, and it’s permanent.

The researchers developed a pattern recognition program that mapped X- and Y-coordinates of spots, then compared them between whale shark photographs

Soon they were joined by a NASA astrophysicist who introduced them to an astronomer who’d developed algorithms to compare photographs of the night sky and determine what star patterns they had in common.  The scientists adapted the equations to instead study whale sharks.

Read more in the original article here.