Technological Advances to Improve Manta Research

March 2020

One of the most time consuming tasks for our research team in the Maldives is the photo identification process. Using new technologies we are speeding up the ID process hugely and streamlining our data storage systems to make collaborating and sharing and comparing data globally more easy.

The Maldives is home to the largest documented population of reef manta rays in the world. With nearly 5,000 individuals on record the matching process becomes increasingly challenging. Thankfully, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. We can filter the database by region, number of spots and gender but it still means we need to compare ID submissions against a few hundred individuals. With thousands of sightings every year, this does still take up a lot of our teams time.

The IDtheManta software has been developed to automatically identify mantas in the image. This is no easy task! Image recognition software is developing fast, but as a small marine conservation charity, we certainly don’t have the same resources as other corporations. To make things trickier, manta ID shots are often less than ideal. Either taken from a poor angle, badly exposed as you’re shooting up at the sun, shot in plankton filled water, and then there’s those pesky cleaner fish and remoras covering up spots!

The second part of this project was to develop an online platform where people around the world (researchers and citizen scientists alike) can submit their manta ID photos. The platform will store all the sightings data from around the world and make it easier for researchers to collaborate, share, and compare their sightings data.

The online platform will be account based, so you can log in and add new sightings and have your own profile with all the mantas you’ve submitted from around the world be it Maldives, Mexico or Mozambique.