Explore the underwater world and contribute to science with MBARI’s FathomVerse 2.0.

Katie Rodriguez here, playing around with the new FathomVerse 2.0 game on my phone to see what it’s about.

Created by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and a few other collaborators, the game uses actual footage from the depths of the ocean and has players identify the animals that pop up on the screen.

The game works by placing the player in a virtual underwater current, where you drift alongside all of these clickable circles, each of which represent a sea creature. 

You’re given a mission: collect, identify and sort as many species of marine life as possible, matching up the image that pops up on screen to its proper category.

Right away, I found the game to be fairly scientific. In their animal library, you can play with various images that denote the family, genus and species. It’s pretty interesting in the sense that you might think one animal looks like, say, a jellyfish, but you find out it's actually classified as a ctenophore. 

What’s a ctenophore? You might ask. Well, even though they’re also known as “comb jellies,” and look like small little gelatinous creatures with rainbow-like displays, ctenophores are in an entirely different phylum (taxonomic grouping).

Suffice to say, it gets nerdy pretty quick. But it’s a fun way to be a citizen scientist, and to get to see what these creatures actually look like based on scientific imagery captured by MBARI. 

The kicker—all of the labeling, identifying and sorting that’s done by the gamers is actually training artificial intelligence to identify these ocean animals. The labeling done within FathomVerse is designed to help scientists process ocean imagery more quickly.

The game currently has more than 30,000 players from over 170 countries, with access to 80,000-plus newly labeled images. 

As I was playing the game and getting confused about what I was seeing, I wondered what would happen if people identify animals incorrectly?

Scientists with MBARI have created a consensus protocol where each time a player labels an animal in an image, it counts as a vote toward consensus. Once an image receives enough votes, they can be confident that the whole FathomVerse community (which they call FathomNauts) agrees on the label. 

“After this, an expert on our team verifies all the consensus labels before we share the results with the organization that contributed the data,” said Lilli Carlsen, FathomNet Engagement Coordinator at MBARI, in an email response.

The game is free—give it a try on your smartphone or tablet by downloading on the App Store or on Google Play.