… We have sensors along all of our coasts that can detect basically anything in the water. Obviously it’s mostly looking for submarines from enemy nations, but they routinely “spot” whales.
I feel like using literally any actual measurement tool would be better for data collection that just a bunch of people saying they saw one.
Hell we have enough satellites to track whales. Especially since they have to surface to breath.
I understand the ocean is vast, but it’s not like we are trying to count giant squids. These things come to surface all the time and they frequent areas often occupied with humans. We could absolutely have more accurate numbers than “sightings”.
Hell we have enough satellites to track whales. Especially since they have to surface to breath.
That photo shows two partly submerged Russian submarines in a port, so no waves. Those submarines are 73m long, so longer then a normal whale and the part above the water is also larger then your normal whale. In other words there is no way to spot a whale in the open ocean with satellites.
Yeah that’s not even close to the most powerful satellite that the US government has. They only allow public images to be shared with a resolution of ~25-30cm/Pixel if memory serves correctly. They have had much more powerful spy satellites for years now.
Now I am fully aware that those types of satellites would never be allowed to be “wasted” on silly things like counting whales, but again hypothetically if they really really wanted to they absolutely could use them to do that sort of thing.
You would probably want to tag several pods with physical trackers and then watch those whales with the satellite. After training it on that data for long enough you could hypothetically make software that spots whales surfacing and then sees what direction they are likely going and it can then start to guess where they think that same pod will pop up later using the data it gathered from those pods being tracked physically with trackers from before.
Obviously I am simplifying and hand waving away a ton of unbelievably complicated things but given enough time and money I think you could absolutely create a system that is able to track and count whales using satellites in a way that would likely be more accurate than any only human based counting method.
You would probably want to tag several pods with physical trackers and then watch those whales with the satellite. After training it on that data for long enough you could hypothetically make software that spots whales surfacing and then sees what direction they are likely going and it can then start to guess where they think that same pod will pop up later using the data it gathered from those pods being tracked physically with trackers from before.
Yes, we could hypothetically do the things we are already doing for tracking how tagged whales behave in addition to using spottings as a way to estimate numbers of whales.
What you aren’t understanding is the scope of the ocean and that being able to do these things in small areas or with a limited number of tagged animals is vastly different than doing it for the entire ocean. That is why they use crowdsourced techniques like spotting!
I feel like using literally any actual measurement tool would be better for data collection that just a bunch of people saying they saw one.
Cool, cool. You are wrong though. Science says you are wrong.
Hell we have enough satellites to track whales. Especially since they have to surface to breath.
No, we don’t have enough satellites to track every time a whale surfaces to breathe. Nor do we have the ability for satellites to know if it is the same whale.
Yeah… And they used to scramble peoples brains with an ice pick to try and fix people with depression. Then they learned there is a better way to do things. Science can always be improved. It’s incredibly naive to think the method with which we use to count whales currently could not also be improved or made more accurate in any way.
… We have sensors along all of our coasts that can detect basically anything in the water. Obviously it’s mostly looking for submarines from enemy nations, but they routinely “spot” whales.
I feel like using literally any actual measurement tool would be better for data collection that just a bunch of people saying they saw one.
Hell we have enough satellites to track whales. Especially since they have to surface to breath.
I understand the ocean is vast, but it’s not like we are trying to count giant squids. These things come to surface all the time and they frequent areas often occupied with humans. We could absolutely have more accurate numbers than “sightings”.
That photo shows two partly submerged Russian submarines in a port, so no waves. Those submarines are 73m long, so longer then a normal whale and the part above the water is also larger then your normal whale. In other words there is no way to spot a whale in the open ocean with satellites.
Yeah that’s not even close to the most powerful satellite that the US government has. They only allow public images to be shared with a resolution of ~25-30cm/Pixel if memory serves correctly. They have had much more powerful spy satellites for years now.
Now I am fully aware that those types of satellites would never be allowed to be “wasted” on silly things like counting whales, but again hypothetically if they really really wanted to they absolutely could use them to do that sort of thing.
You would probably want to tag several pods with physical trackers and then watch those whales with the satellite. After training it on that data for long enough you could hypothetically make software that spots whales surfacing and then sees what direction they are likely going and it can then start to guess where they think that same pod will pop up later using the data it gathered from those pods being tracked physically with trackers from before.
Obviously I am simplifying and hand waving away a ton of unbelievably complicated things but given enough time and money I think you could absolutely create a system that is able to track and count whales using satellites in a way that would likely be more accurate than any only human based counting method.
Yes, we could hypothetically do the things we are already doing for tracking how tagged whales behave in addition to using spottings as a way to estimate numbers of whales.
What you aren’t understanding is the scope of the ocean and that being able to do these things in small areas or with a limited number of tagged animals is vastly different than doing it for the entire ocean. That is why they use crowdsourced techniques like spotting!
Cool, cool. You are wrong though. Science says you are wrong.
No, we don’t have enough satellites to track every time a whale surfaces to breathe. Nor do we have the ability for satellites to know if it is the same whale.
Yeah… And they used to scramble peoples brains with an ice pick to try and fix people with depression. Then they learned there is a better way to do things. Science can always be improved. It’s incredibly naive to think the method with which we use to count whales currently could not also be improved or made more accurate in any way.