A flurry of excitement rippled through whale enthusiasts when two rare, all-white, baby humpbacks were spotted by tourists in the Kingdom of Tonga in 2024. These unrelated calves, nicknamed Siale and Mahina, were photographed frolicking beside their mothers in Tonga’s tropical waters.

A few of those images were uploaded to Happywhale , an AI platform founded in 2015 to identify and track marine mammals.

One year later, someone snapped a photo of a white humpback off New South Wales, Australia. Happywhale immediately identified it as Siale , reassuring fans that the young whale was still alive and well.

Happywhale now includes more than 1.6 million photos of whales, uploaded by 53,000 people from more than 100 countries. The platform identifies individual whales with a 97 to 99% accuracy rate by matching unique characteristics—like the markings on a fluke or the shape of a dorsal fin—to all images in the database.

“It’s like Facebook for whales,” Ted Cheeseman, the marine scientist who co-founded Happywhale, told me on a Zoom call. “It lets us open a door into the deep, vast ocean that we can’t perceive very well. With this platform, we can follow a whale and really see their journey.”

In July, Happywhale won the 2026 AI for Good Impact Award in the AI for planet category. The award acknowledges how the platform has revolutionized marine research by reducing the time it takes to identify a whale from days to seconds.

Plus, since it’s largely powered by citizens who upload photos during whale watching trips, the platform also presents a unique opportunity to directly engage tourists in conserving ocean wildlife.

“That’s the case for Happywhale: you can’t protect what you can’t see and measure,” Brittany Solano, director of communications for Earth Species Project , told me in an email. The Earth Species Project uses AI to study and decode animal communication. “The AI for Good award is well-deserved. Happywhale is the perfect confluence of citizen science, machine learning, and real-world impact.”

Happywhale Streamlines Whale Research

In addition to connecting tourists to the whales they spot on vacation, Happywhale has also changed the game for marine biologists. The AI platform delivered “a thousand-fold increase in efficiency” in identifying animals, Cheeseman said.

One of the super-users of Happywhale is Conor Ryan, a naturalist with National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions and honorary research fellow at Scottish Association for Marine Science. Ryan has submitted more than 3,000 images to Happywhale of marine mammals he’s seen on expeditions in the North Atlantic and Antarctica.

Before Happywhale, Ryan had to identify whales the old-fashioned way.

“After a day’s fieldwork for my PhD studying fin whales off Ireland, I was uploading my pictures and cropping them, and then doing the arduous task of emailing colleagues all over the world saying, ‘Hey, have you seen this one? Do you recognize this one?’” Ryan told me in a phone interview.

Happywhale streamlined this “incredibly slow and very inefficient” process, Ryan said. More importantly, it gave scientists a global view of where whales migrate, eat, mate and congregate. This view grows clearer each day as more people around the world contribute images of whales.

AI Science Platform Has Global Impacts For Whales

As a case in point for how Happywhale offers important perspectives into ocean health, Solano points to new research based on Happywhale’s images of individual whales that shows the “tragic loss” of one-third of Hawai‘i’s humpback population during the 2013-2016 marine heatwave.

“That record is what enabled scientists to see changes in whale populations that were otherwise invisible,” Solano said.

The heatwave reduced food for Hawai‘i-born humpbacks in their feeding grounds off southeast Alaska. This climate event had long-term effects on the health and reproduction of these migrating whales.

Happywhale is also highlighting places where whales venture off the beaten path. For instance, in 2023 the Happywhale database showed a humpback named Frodo completed a record-breaking, 6,000-mile journey from the Mariana Islands to Mexico, a surprising anomaly outside of typical humpback migration routes.

“We’re seeing more and more of those curiosities, individuals that break out and go somewhere else,” Ryan told me. “These outliers are important for spreading DNA and making populations more robust and resistant to disease.”

All told, Happywhale has informed research that’s appeared in more than 40 peer-reviewed studies, and has also influenced global marine conservation policies.

AI applications like Happywhale offer promise for conserving ocean ecosystems, according to an opinion article authored by Cheeseman and colleagues that appears this month in Marine Mammal Science .

However, the authors caution that conservation success depends on scientists approaching AI development “as captains rather than crew”—meaning that scientists must still intentionally design, interpret, oversee and collaborate on these AI systems.

Connecting Cruise Ship Tourists To Whale Conservation

As a scientist, Ryan appreciates how the AI platform has leveled the playing field and encouraged collaboration among biologists in different parts of the globe.

“I submit everything to Happywhale in the hopes that one day all species will be able to be matched up. Plus, it’s a good backup for all my images, and then they’re available for other scientists to download and use.”

As a naturalist aboard small cruise ships, Ryan also values how Happywhale connects tourists to the animals they spot in the wild.

“Ten seconds after seeing a whale, we have a match and can tell our guests where it was seen last, whether it has a name, maybe even about its mother,” Ryan said. “That’s super powerful because it changes the whale from a random individual to one with a story and a history.”

Aboard Linblad Expeditions cruises, Ryan says they have “Happywhale happy hours”. Guests gather in the lounge, have a drink, and put the Happywhale map on a big screen to see where the whales they watched that day have been spotted previously.

Ryan encourages cruise ship guests to upload their own photos of whales, too. They automatically get an email update from Happywhale when that animal is spotted again.

“On some dark, horrible wintry morning, you’ll get an email and be like, ‘Hey, my whale is swimming around in the Cape Verde Islands’, which is wonderful,” Ryan said.

Expanding AI To Identify More Ocean Animals

Humpbacks are the easiest to identify with AI algorithms. But Happywhale creators are hard at work on finding algorithms that easily identify other marine mammals, too, such as Risso’s dolphins .

Next up, Cheeseman hopes to perfect the identification of gray whales.

“The eastern North Pacific gray whales need our help right now,” Cheeseman told me. “Changing ocean conditions mean they simply aren’t finding enough food, and their numbers have dropped dramatically over the past ten years.”

Happywhale can be a resource for better understanding gray whale populations from Baja to the Bering Sea. Tracking individual whales over months, years or even decades allows scientists to monitor body condition, reproductive success, survival and shifting migration patterns.

“I’m really hoping we can do for gray whales what we’ve done for humpbacks over the last 10 years,” Cheeseman said.

Scaling Up Whale Data With Drones

Another way to scale up the conservation impact of Happywhale is to use drones to capture images of marine mammals, especially in remote locations like Antarctica.

The majority of the photos in the Happywhale database come from tourist hotspots where people flock to see whales, like Hawai‘i, eastern Australia, Alaska or California.

“Citizen science is incredibly powerful, but it’s also limited to where people show up,” Cheeseman told me.

While in Antarctica this past February to study the impact of industrial krill fishing on whales , Cheeseman had a brainstorm. Rather than watching one small patch of ocean from a boat, hoping to get a good photo of a fluke, he could use fixed-wing drones to survey whales at a much larger scale.

“I was penciling it out at the end of the trip, and it cost us $2,000 a mile to survey with binoculars from a boat,” Cheeseman said. “I might be able to chop almost three zeros off that and bring the cost down to less than $10 a mile with drone images. Think of what we’d be able to learn then!”

Happywhale is a great example of how AI can make a difference for conserving our planet. From its algorithms’ work on a single photograph, this online platform is creating long-term relationships with a whale—like Siale, the humpback calf beloved by whale-watchers in Tonga and Australia.

These relationships with individual whales lead to more people caring about marine animals and the oceans they swim in.

“I feel like I know the whales more now,” Ryan said. “I think Happywhale is a force for good, and I’m glad to have it.”