Worsening of ID detection of nursehound sharks in the last few months

[Anastasia]

Thanks for getting back to me!

We have been refining the algorithms in Sharkbook over the last few months and I confirmed that as the algorithms improve, it’s normal to see fewer match candidates displayed. This is because as it gets better at identifying individuals, it will present fewer matches that are not as likely to be your shark. Additionally, as individuals are assigned, the match candidate pool tends to be reduced because a successfully identified individual will have its own individual score (you can see this button on the top of the match results page). This computes one match score for every individual in the database and is an aggregate of each image score for that individual.

@edesabata

The good news is that just now I was just able to get a positive match Sharkbook: Wildbook for Sharks , but my worry is that it said

Matched…against 4 candidates

Surely there should be more than 4 candidates?

Yes, this is weird. I’ll need to check with a teammate who’s out of the office right now, because my expectation is that the number should be higher than 4 here.

@edesabata

On another note, moving the cursor over the candidates score now won’t result in the corrisponding new image to check.

You have to click on each result now to display it instead of hovering over it. This change was part of the Wildbook 10.1.0 release.

@edesabata

As for stingrays and eagle rays, I am actually doing the ID now. It works fine within this season, and will start looking at past years to find some matches…

MiewID is coming to MantaMatcher in the future. Right now all mantas there are spot-mapped from photos of their undersides to ID them. I’ll send you an email so we can talk more about the additional species support with the rest of the team.