Whale ID AI Initiative

This project began in collaboration with Dr. Caine Delacy and a marine NGO in French Polynesia, rooted in a simple premise: that effective protection starts with the ability to know — to track not populations in aggregate, but whales as individuals. It is a deeply technical and deeply human pursuit, designed to empower those working on the frontlines of marine conservation with tools that are adaptive, precise, and theirs to own.

We're building an agentic software system capable of identifying humpback whales not by isolated fluke patterns, but by analyzing entire anatomical features using high-resolution imagery and multi-agent computer vision pipelines. From dorsal ridge structures to scar patterns, every trait becomes signal — not just to a classifier, but to a growing, decentralized intelligence system built for the ocean.

This isn’t just software — it’s sovereignty infrastructure. The system is designed to run locally or remotely, enabling field biologists, conservation NGOs, and community monitors to upload imagery, receive high-confidence individual matches, and contribute to a shared yet non-extractive database of whale movements and identity. All without needing cloud infrastructure, proprietary tools, or outside control.

Under the hood, the application is powered by a modular agent framework:

1. The ProcessingAgent manages concurrent anatomical recognition jobs and stores match histories.

2. The UploadAgent handles secure file validation with feedback loops.

3. The StatusAgent streams real-time analysis states through WebSocket channels.

4. The DatabaseAgent maintains individual profiles, supporting both longitudinal research and decentralized metadata control.

Built in collaboration with the communities it intends to serve, this system is meant to scale horizontally — from one NGO in the South Pacific to an interoperable network of local nodes across global migration routes. In doing so, we begin to answer a new question:

What does marine protection look like when those closest to the water control the intelligence required to defend it?