Now Amateurs Can Help Researchers Identify Plankton Too

No doubt we’ve all had that fantasy—while stuck in traffic or at a dull dinner with the family—to pack it all in, move to Miami and count plankton professionally. After all, plankton forms the bottom of the ocean food chain; phytoplankton is critical to Earth’s carbon cycle and the tiny little creatures are bellwethers of the health of the ocean ecosystem. So a midlife crisis that leads to counting up plankton is a midlife crisis for the common good.

Well, now you can live that dream without burning any bridges. Thanks to a new program at University of Miami, you can help scientists identify species and orientation of plankton in images taken by their underwater robot, without getting wet, or even leaving your house. All you need is to go to the website, Plankton Portal, take the short orientation, and get going.

The In Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System, which sort of looks like four torpedoes, “operates as an ocean scanner that casts the shadow of tiny and transparent oceanic creatures onto a very high-resolution digital sensor at very high frequency.” The result is inky black images with the plankton in bright white amid dustings of marine snow.

Volunteers mark the plankton from front to back, side to side, and then classify it using a really simple, amateur-friendly classification system. When you’ve finished one page, you can move on to the next. The whole program has a really nice, easy and attractive interface. The tone of the tutorial is incredibly encouraging. After a less-than-perfect page of plankton identification, it told me, “Don’t worry if you miss one, each page is looked at multiple volunteers.”

The goal of the site is to enlist volunteers to classify millions of underwater images to study plankton diversity, distribution and behavior in the open ocean. The ISIIS can take in images faster than researchers could possibly analyze it, so the Plankton Portal is yet another elegant solution that calls upon the laypeople to contribute. It's an exciting time to be a layperson, really, where you can count plankton one day, research a trip to Jupiter's moon Europa the next, and at night in between let your computer help search for pulsars in deep space.

"In three days, we collected data that would take us more than three years to analyze," said Jessica Luo, graduate student involved in this project. "It is impossible for us to individually classify every image by hand, which is why we are exploring different options for image analysis, from automatic image recognition software to crowd-sourcing to citizen scientists."

The automatic image recognition can sort out what’s plankton and what is a jellyfish or shrimp, but Luo said, “to distinguish different species within an order or family, that is still best done by the human eye."

So if, at the end of the day, you’re feeling some ennui, and you want to contribute to the research of plankton in pretty much the easiest way imaginable, jump on through the Plankton Portal.