Deep data
We as humans have been making sense of the world for at least 100,000 years, whether through oral and cultural knowledge, or by scrawling everything interesting we see onto cave walls or digital devices.
Thanks to the Internet, our petroglyphs are now vast crowdsourced digital resources like iNaturalist.org. These are broadly participatory and freely mined for insights by anyone interested.
(Because this need not happen exclusively under the auspices of institutional specialists, the term “citizen science” was invented.)Whale migrations
A beloved annual occurrence throughout the tropics is the seasonal arrivals of migratory whales, primarily humpbacks, who leave the rich and stormy feeding grounds of the high latitudes to spend the winter months bathing in warm waters with their young.
This well-known pattern is clearly evident in the iNaturalist observation data for the Hawaiian Islands (Mokupuni Hawaiʻi):
(Link to whale photo/observation above. Charts created using d3.js, a flexible, interactive, web-native SVG data visualization library.)
Humpback whale sightings dominate the iNaturalist observations from December thru April, while spinner dolphins are seen throughout the year.
The number of observations submitted has greatly increased since 2021, thanks to the utility and popularity of this platform.
Sharks
Shark observations in the Hawaiian Islands are more evenly distributed over the year, with variability that may represent random observation biases as much as real differences month-to-month.
Fish
Carangiformes, a large order of fishes that includes jacks, trevally, and barracuda, are also fairly evenly distributed in Hawaiʻi during the year:
Differential statistics
Comparing bin-wise distributional skews between Selachii (sharks) and Carangiformes indicates some seasonal differences in sightings:
It appears that shark observations are shifted in abundance toward the first part of the year (Feb to June), compared to Carangiformes, observations for which are relatively shifted toward the autumn months. There may well be a known reason for this, that relates to the seasonal dynamics of these species?
It is interesting to see these kinds of patterns emerge from the collective observational efforts of the ‘citizen science’ community, and there will no doubt be more to come in this series.