Whales With A Tale: AI For Good Award Goes To Happywhale

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.”

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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.

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.

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