Environment · Breakthrough
The naturalist who gave almost every humpback in the North Pacific a fingerprint
Ted Cheeseman, Ken Southerland · Global platform; contributors in more than 100 countries
Ted Cheeseman built a website where anyone with a whale-tail photo can help identify individual whales, and it grew into the biggest photographic record anyone has built for a whale species.
The person and the place
Ted Cheeseman is a lifelong naturalist, and he is pursuing a PhD on humpback whales at Southern Cross University in Australia.
The problem Ted cared about
By the ITU's account, identifying one humpback from a photo of its tail could take a scientist more than an hour, and matching by hand was too slow for the ocean-scale collaboration the science needed.
The agency moment
In 2015 he co-founded Happywhale with Ken Southerland. Anyone can upload a photo of a whale's tail, kayakers and tourists as readily as researchers, an AI proposes a match from the unique markings, and a scientist confirms every one.
What changed, with evidence
It grew into the biggest photographic record anyone has built for a whale species. When the ITU gave Happywhale an AI for Good award in July 2026, it counted more than 1.5 million photos, more than 120,000 whales and dolphins identified, and 53,000 people in more than 100 countries sending pictures in. Its first big finding, in Royal Society Open Science with more than 70 co-authors, showed the North Pacific humpback population drop by roughly 7,000 whales between 2012 and 2021, close to a fifth of it, a marine-heat-wave signal no single researcher could have seen without everyone's photos.
Where it led
The data now helps scientists and agencies like NOAA track how a warming ocean is reshaping whale populations, built from photos taken by people who were simply out on the water.
The move worth copying
He built it so that a tourist with a phone counts as a contributor rather than an audience. If you have whale-tail photos sitting in an old camera roll, they are still worth uploading.
"It's this five-meter banner, saying: This is my identity!" — Ted Cheeseman, Fast Company
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
Sources last verified .
- Fast Company, live page blocked to readers, March 2024 ↗
- NOAA Fisheries, an institutional partner whose scientists co-authored the paper, February 2024 ↗
- ITU AI for Good, the body that gave Happywhale its 2026 award, July 2026 ↗
- Courthouse News, May 2024 ↗
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