For the community science project, I decided to participate in a project called ‘Invader ID’. This project located in the climate section of the website focuses on the marine life—tracking changes in the types of organisms and how abundant different groups of organisms are, we can see how ecosystems are changing over time. My task as a citizen scientist was to play my part in identifying various organisms to better help the other scientists understand how human activity affects coastal environments.
Tube dwelling worm
The process of classifying each organism is making your best guess based on each of the pictures provided along with different typical characteristics and textures.Although the majority of the tasks are guessing games, our brain is really good at picking up patterns , so we tend to make better guesses than we realize. But since theres strength in numbers, if more people who identify the same image than the researchers can figure it out easier by process of elimination. The source of all the data is coming from photos taken in the summer of 2018 in Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. After completing this project I realized how limited our resources can be when it comes to identifying and discovering new ways to help the unknown species of this world. In class, we always have to keep in the back of our minds that not every question has been answered yet and I felt that here while making my guesses on what these several photos could possibly be or will become.
Algae
That was very interesting Valentina. It is amazing that with all our technology available to us these days, that we are still so far from being able to efficiently utilize them to do these types of observations. They probably could have written a program to make the observations, but the amount of time it would take to code and test it would probably be more than the time it takes humans to identify the pictures themselves.
I was wondering, did you have any prior experience with marine biology or did they organizers create template pictures based on the types of organisms they expected to be in the photographs? I personally had never heard of a ‘tube dwelling worm’ before and I cannot even see anything that looks remotely like a worm in the picture you posted, so unless I had something explicitly letting me know what to look for, I certainly would not be of much use at all on that particular project.
You also mentioned that this involves an ultimate goal of noticing change over time, so i was wondering, did they say how often they do this particular exercise over this one area? I was wondering if this was a first round, or they are in the midst of the project and if so, have they already noticed any increase or decrease in organisms in this particular area?
Hey Valentina,
This project is really interesting to me because of the way it combines environmental factors and human activity and the effect it has on coastal environments. I think it relates a lot to when we talked about climate change in our class and how we need to be more aware of our impact on the environment. I like how you mentioned that our brain is good at picking up patterns, the community science project that I participated in was also about identifying organisms by looking at a picture (granted they were more familiar organisms like badgers, deers, and birds) ! I was wondering something similar to Christopher, did the project give you some background or defining characteristics of these organisms beforehand?