Francesco Ferretti, a post-doctoral researcher at Hopkins Marine Station, couldn’t have picked a better weekend to take his parents whalewatching in Monterey Bay. They had already spotted more than 40 ocean giants, including a group of juvenile humpbacks that spouted playfully and scratched their backs on the bottom of the boat.
Ferretti had a eureka moment. He was surrounded by whale enthusiasts capturing data-packed photographs of juvenile humpbacks. It was a research project waiting to happen.
A year later, he launched a citizen science initiative called SharkPulse. Through the SharkPulse website and smartphone app, people can upload their pictures to an expanding database that records which kinds of sharks are found, where and when.
Ferretti has been obsessed with sharks since he was 10 years old.
“Lots of people blame the movie Jaws for the bad image of sharks,” he says. “And this is true – the image is totally wrong. But there was a marine biologist in the movie, and he was so charming!”
Ferretti was entranced by Matt Hooper, the adventurous scientist and hero in Jaws, as a child in Italy. As a marine biology major in college, Ferretti came to understand sharks as crucial members of ocean ecosystems.
“They’re fascinating animals,” he says, seated in his office at Hopkins, facing neatly shelved volumes of scientific shark reports and popular shark lore. “It seems they are the perfect machine in the ocean. They’ve been shaped by half a billion years of selection, and they’re a great beauty of nature.”
The presence of large predators like sharks signals a healthy ocean ecosystem. Monterey Bay is an important white shark feeding ground. Here, the white shark population affects the abundance of seals, sea otters and animals further down the food chain. The depletion of one can start a domino effect of impact on others.
He investigates how humans have influenced shark populations worldwide, but he struggles with the lack of available information. According to a paper published in the journal Marine Policy last year, people are responsible for the deaths of 100 million sharks annually. The fast pace of unsustainable killing makes it hard for scientists to estimate the numbers of sharks worldwide.
“We know we’ve been messing around with the ocean, and we know that many species of sharks have been declining, but we don’t know what the ocean looked like before human impacts,” Ferretti says.
With funding from the Lenfest Ocean Program, and in collaboration with CSUMB student Andy Alverez, Twitter employee Emanuel Mazzilli and Hopkins research assistant Cheryl Butner, Ferretti was able to get SharkPulse up and running.
Through the SharkPulse website and associated app for iPhone and Android, people worldwide can post their shark pictures online to be identified by professionals like Ferretti.
Cell phone images are often accompanied by information about when and where the picture was taken. “Pictures are like little data sets,” Ferretti says.
The data will help scientists understand the distributions of sharks, and give future scientists more accurate historic data.
A crucial step in determining the health of a shark population is establishing how many animals would naturally exist if humans weren’t trapping them in nets or chopping off their fins.
“Unless we have a baseline for historical levels, we have no way to know whether the population is healthy,” says Salvador Jorgensen, a Monterey Bay Aquarium research scientist who focuses on the ecology of white sharks. “[SharkPulse] is a great example of that kind of approach.”
But efforts like Ferretti’s can only succeed if the public participates.
He hopes locals will be some of the most enthusiastic contributors to SharkPulse.
“The people here are very lucky. They live in an area where the marine ecosystem is much more preserved than in many other areas around the world,” he says. “They can be champions of the marine environment and keep an eye on this precious population.”
He says everyone can help gather data with the shared goal of preserving marine life.
A recent publication in Nature finds Americans watch a total of 200 billion hours of TV every year.
“If we could convince them to spend just a little bit of that time for science,” Ferretti says, “their efforts would be useful and important.”
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