ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — June 21, 2014 — The half-dozen bottlenose dolphins off the bow appeared to be swimming apart, so marine science professor Shannon Gowans halted the pursuit and pointed skipper Emily Sullivan in another direction.
“Nikki, are you good?” Gowans shouted to Nikki Szlamnik, who cradled a Canon camera with a foot-long zoom lens.
Nodding, Szlamnik replied, “I think I got a good one of each one.”
The trio were participating in a summer tradition known as the Eckerd College Dolphin Project, an ongoing research effort to track, photograph and identify the dolphin population of Boca Ciega Bay.
For three hours this day, soon-to-be sophomore Sullivan steered the 19-foot Cape Horn through an area that included Bunces Pass, near the bridge to Fort De Soto Park.
Szlamnik, who will be a senior this fall majoring in human development and psychology, drew the assignment of snapping close-ups of every dorsal fin that slid out of the water.
That's the key to the project — a good digital image of one unique marker that sets apart what appear to be indistinguishable mammals.
Experts such as Gowans can identify individual dolphins based on gashes from boat propellers, sharks and fishing entanglement, tiny nicks and deformations, and normal wear and tear in the cartilage that makes up the fin.
And with the help of recognition software developed at Eckerd, the chore of comparing thousands of images has become a lot easier.
On a bench in the Galbraith Marine Science Laboratory at Eckerd, Gowans pulled up a photo from a recent sighting on a computer monitor and zoomed in on a dorsal fin of a dolphin arcing through the bay's surface.
She made a few clicks to create a digital outline of the fin and, with another click, a complicated algorithm took over to compare the image with 881 dorsal fins in Eckerd's catalog.
The software, DARWIN — for Digital Analysis and Recognition of Whale Images on the Network — was developed by Eckerd's computer science department with input from the Dolphin Project. The software ranked potential matches.
Read the full story from the St. Petersburg Tribune