CNN
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On summer mornings, local kids love to gather at Padaro Beach in California to learn to surf the gentle whitewater waves. A few years ago, the beach also became a popular spot for juvenile white sharks.
That led to the launch of SharkEye, an initiative at UC Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Sciences Laboratory (BOSL) that uses drones to observe what’s going on beneath the waves.
If a shark is spotted, SharkEye sends a text message to about 80 people who have signed up for alerts, including local lifeguards, surf shop owners and parents of kids taking lessons.
Other initiatives have been observed in recent years officers and lifeguards from New York to Sydney using drones to keep beachgoers safe, watching video streamed from a camera. This requires the pilot to stay focused on the screen, battling choppy water and glare from the sun to distinguish sharks from paddlefish, seals and wavy strands of kelp. One study found that human-observed drones only detected sharks about 60 percent of the time.
SharkEye—part research program, part community safety tool—uses the video it collects to analyze shark behavior. It also fed its footage into a computer vision machine learning model – a type of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that allows computers to glean information from images and videos – to train it to spot great white sharks near Padaro Beach, near to a city Santa Barbara.
“Automating shark detection … can (also) to be really useful to a lot of communities outside of ours here in California,” Neil Nathan, project scientist at BOSL, who graduated from Stanford University with a master’s degree in environmental studies a few years ago, told CNN.
The rise in popularity of drones and the proliferation of social media can make it seem like sharks are everywhere. It doesn’t help that warming ocean temperatures are pushing sharks into new habitats, and that juvenile great whites, which can grow to about 8 to 10 feet in length, like to hang out close to shore, making them more visible to beachgoers .
Yet shark attacks are rare. In 2023, 69 people worldwide were victims of unprovoked bites – which corresponds to an average of 63 annual incidents between 2018 and 2022. Only 10 of those died, according to the Natural History Museum’s International Shark Attack File of Florida.
Although no fatal attack has been recorded at Padaro Beach, some members of the community were concerned when sharks began to prowl there.
That’s why SharkEye has been regularly conducting drone flights to monitor the coastline for about five years, once spotting 15 young great white sharks in one day.
Early tests show the AI technology is already performing “incredibly well”, detecting most sharks a human can detect and sometimes sharks the human has missed, perhaps because they were swimming too deep to spot it easily, he said Nathan.
This summer, the project began field testing technology by pitting drone pilots against AI. Its pilot surveys the area and counts the number of sharks he spots. The SharkEye model then analyzes the video to see how many sharks it can find.
Today, community alerts are based on human analysis. If all goes well, those reports could become AI-assisted — with manual monitoring and checks — by the end of the season or early next summer, Nathan said. In the future, the process may even become fully automated, making it faster and potentially more accurate.
AI and wildlife
AI technologies are are used in myriad ways to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. In India, AI-powered cameras alert villagers when tigers approach their livestock, and in Australia, the technology is being used to manage some of the dangerous creatures.
Ripper Corp and academics pioneered what they say are the world’s first shark identification algorithms, which were used in drones a few years ago. The latest version of the software is being tested in the Australian state of Queensland, Mexico and the Caribbean to detect sharks and crocodiles.
However, AI is not yet widely used for shark detection. Surf Life Saving New South Wales, which protects dozens of beaches along the state’s coast, including Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach, uses drones at 50 locations. But a spokesperson told CNN that their drones don’t currently use AI.
An Australian university group working on AI-enhanced shark-spotting tools wrote in 2022 that the technology could struggle when it encounters conditions not present in the training data.
SharkEye plans to make its model free and available for researchers to modify or upgrade, as well as create an AI-powered app that makes it easy for people like lifeguards and drone enthusiasts to release their footage. This can help keep people safe, but also allow people to better understand and protect sharks.
Nathan said it remains to be seen how much retraining will be needed for SharkEye to expand to other locations. He hopes that if drone pilots fly at the same speed and altitude, they won’t have too many problems elsewhere in California, where the coastline is similar.
Officials in Honolulu said this month they are considering launching a drone shark monitoring program, according to local media. If SharkEye’s technology is used in places like Hawaii, where tiger sharks are a major concern and the color of the water is different, more retraining may be needed. But Nathan said SharkEye is open to working with other localities to help adapt the model.
“Communities want to have that knowledge and that awareness so that it’s easier to share water with these creatures more safely,” Nathan said. “Sharks are an amazing species that we’re still learning about.”
