FISHstory: A Citizen Science Project

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By Cameron Rhodes

When we first think of cowboys, we likely jump to images of the American west, felt hats, spurs, and well-worn boots. While these visions certainly rustle up adventures and traditions both dreamy and harrowing, another less obvious cowboy carries through American history as well. You definitely won’t find him on the back of a horse. Instead, through the haze of salty spray and the smell of fresh fish, you’ll glimpse him at the helm of a boat.

Americana undoubtedly lives among fishing fleets in the Southeast United States, and there’s a lot we can glean from such a storied past to better inform the future of fisheries in the region. Rusty Hudson, a third-generation fisherman from Daytona Beach, Florida, saw that potential in the thousands of photographs he and his family had saved from their charter fishing operation in the 1940s through 1970s.

These photographs show captains and clients smiling with groupers, snappers, jacks, mackerels, dolphinfish, and other species, providing a literal snapshot of catch before dedicated catch monitoring efforts began for charter boats in the Southeast. Hudson recognized the value of this precious information and reached out to scientists in the area to discuss options for analyzing the photographs. Years later, with the help of a NOAA Fisheries’ Fisheries Information Systems grant, a newly established Citizen Science Program found a home for Hudson’s bank of historic photographs, developing the infrastructure and tools for a project now known to over a thousand citizen scientists as FISHstory.

FISHstory, which uses the power of the crowd to identify fish in Hudson’s photographs, is the second citizen science pilot project for the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, a body responsible for proposing management measures for species in federal waters (3 to 200 nautical miles) off North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida. Since citizen science allows stakeholders the opportunity to directly contribute to data collection efforts while filling gaps in our understanding, the use of citizen science isn’t uncommon in fisheries science. However, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council realized that developing a dedicated Citizen Science Program would require considerable and deliberate collaboration to ensure that both the Program and its projects could prove useful and informative down the road. Through the help and support of state and federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, and fishermen, the Council’s Citizen Science Program launched its first project just over a year ago. FISHstory followed shortly afterward and launched in May 2020 via the online crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse.

FISHstory provides comprehensive and engaging training materials to help volunteers identify and count fish in Hudson’s photographs, so no prior knowledge of fish identification is even necessary. All are welcome to participate, and since the project is fully accessible online, becoming an active citizen scientist can be accomplished from the comfort of a couch. Each image is analyzed by multiple volunteers, and once analysis on a photo is complete, it is retired. If volunteers don’t agree on what is in a particular photograph, the image is shared with a body of scientists and fishermen that help verify the trickier classifications. Over 1500 volunteers have already made over 26,000 classifications in FISHstory, a truly astounding achievement in just a few short months. Since there are still photographs to be analyzed and the project hopes to expand in the future, there is still much work to be done. By participating as a citizen scientist in FISHstory, volunteers help scientists and managers get a better understanding of historic fish populations, lending critical information and context to conversations of fisheries management today and tomorrow. And while volunteers and project organizers eagerly look ahead to how this information could prove useful in the future, we’re all sent back in time together, exploring both social and natural history. Become a citizen scientist today by joining the FISHstory project, and take a walk down the charter docks of Daytona Beach, Florida alongside our nation’s iconic saltwater cowboys.