Features

The great white challenge

Identifin uses algorithms to identify sharks in what is the aquatic equivalent of a fingerprint.

09 May 2017

Calculating the size of the great white shark population along South Africa's coastline is tricky when all you have to work with are photographs. And when marine biologist Dr Sara Andreotti went goggle-eyed trying to determine how many individual sharks she had captured in 5 000 photographs, she turned to software developers for help.

The result is a program called Identifin, which uses algorithms to analyse the ragged edge of a shark’s dorsal fin to identify each individual, in the aquatic equivalent of a fingerprint.

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