About this data
Acknowledgments & sources
Sightings come from Acartia
(CC BY 4.0) and iNaturalist.
Each one names its original contributor, and photos stay the copyright
of the photographer who took them — shown only where their
licence allows it, always with credit.
How this map changes the data
This map modifies the source data. When Acartia and
iNaturalist appear to describe the same animal, we merge those reports
into one marker. Killer-whale ecotype labels (Bigg's, Southern
Resident) are inferred by this site from the wording
of the observer's description — sometimes with help from a
language model — and are not part of the
original report unless the observer said so themselves. Treat them
as a hint, not a fact. Labels are marked "(inferred)" for a keyword
match or "(AI-inferred)" for a language-model call; if a merge was
confirmed by the model, the popup says "match confirmed by AI".
Automated processing
To merge duplicate reports and infer ecotypes, this site sends parts
of some reports — the observer's description, species, count,
coordinates, timestamp, and contributor name — to Anthropic's
Claude API. Only killer-whale reports with a written description are
ever sent for ecotype reading, and once a report or pair has been
successfully processed, it isn't sent again. The AI only
reads: nothing here trains a model, and Anthropic doesn't
train on this data either. Observers' words are always shown exactly
as written; anything the AI concludes is labelled as this site's
inference, never the observer's.
Location accuracy
iNaturalist deliberately obscures the location of threatened species
before this map ever sees them — the true position can be off
by tens of kilometres. Those markers are drawn with a dashed outline
instead of a solid one, and their popup says: "Location obscured to
protect this species — true position may differ by tens of
kilometres."
Not for navigation
Don't use this map for navigation or anything related to safety at
sea — its bathymetry comes from the GEBCO grid, and GEBCO's
licence explicitly rules out that use. It covers roughly the last 7
days, isn't a scientific dataset, and shouldn't be used to go looking
for marine mammals. Follow the
Be Whale
Wise guidelines instead.
Map tile credits
Base map tiles are © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), © OpenTopoMap
(CC-BY-SA), and Powered by Esri (Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics, GEBCO,
NOAA NGDC, Garmin, and other contributors).
Privacy
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and collects nothing
about you. Map tiles, the mapping library, and photographs load
directly from OpenStreetMap, Esri, OpenTopoMap, unpkg, iNaturalist,
Acartia, and Amazon S3 (Acartia's photo host) — each of those
sees your IP address when your browser requests something from it.