FlukeLog
A citizen-science sighting log for whale and dolphin spotters that uses photo-fin matching to identify individual animals and link sightings along migration corridors.
coastal whale watchers, naturalists and citizen scientists
- AI tail-fin/fluke matching from phone photos with confidence score
- Species heatmap showing sighting density by season and region
- Range-map history for each identified individual
- One-tap export to partner research databases (e.g. OBIS, Happywhale)
High-profile strandings such as the Anholt 'Timmy' humpback mystery have spiked public interest in identifying and tracking individual whales.
Happywhale alone has 729,203 photos, 270,380 identified encounters and 104,834 individual whales from global contributors, plus a 2025 'Timmy' humpback story that generated broad German press — but the addressable audience of active whale-photo submitters remains a small niche.Two humpback whales in Kona waters instantly identified using app with artificial intelligence ↗
Space is crowded by well-funded, free incumbents: Happywhale (web+app), Flukebook by Wild Me, and newer WhaleID all do automated photo-ID with deep-learning; a consumer 'FlukeLog' would compete head-on with established, university-backed platforms.Happywhale ↗Flukebook - Wild Me by Conservation X Labs ↗WhaleID — Building the Future of Whale Identification ↗
Happywhale and the Flukebook ecosystem are free to contributors; the 'Whale Watching' iOS app (the closest consumer sighting-log) is also free — citizen-science cetacean tools have a strong free, researcher/NGO-funded culture, leaving little obvious B2C willingness to pay.Happywhale ↗Whale Watching for iPhone - Free App Download - AppBrain ↗
Cetacean photo-ID and whale-watching citizen science have been sustained for 20+ years (Happywhale since 2015, Flukebook/Wild Me longer) and the 'Timmy' saga shows the topic reliably captures mainstream attention when events occur.Citizen science and automated photo-ID matching of humpback whales (Happywhale poster) ↗Tracking Giants: BCSS and Happywhale Unite for Whale Conservation ↗
Reliable fluke/dorsal-fin matching requires large labeled datasets, curated training pipelines and researcher partnerships (Happywhale, Flukebook and WhaleID each have multi-year ML efforts) — building a credible match engine from scratch is a serious data-and-ML project, not a small MVP.Flukebook - Machine Learning & Citizen Science & Conservation Research ↗WhaleID — Building the Future of Whale Identification ↗