On dreary weekdays during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amy MacLeod, Ph.D., watched her online forum spill over with questions.
Has anyone ever considered farming algae to provide food for marine iguanas during starvation times? asks one participant.
Possibly areas of oil? Inquires another volunteer, worried about the slicked appearance of marine iguana habitat in aerial photos.
Excuse me, why was I not invited to this party?! Rude. comments a third participant, joking about a large cluster — which scientists call a “mess” — of marine iguanas.
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These unusual inquiries are part of MacLeod’s “Iguanas from Above” project, a citizen science initiative in the Galápagos that uses drone photographs to monitor marine iguana populations — with the help of thousands of online participants from across the world.
Sitting in bedrooms, offices, basements, and gardens at the height of the pandemic, students, volunteer citizen scientists, and nature enthusiasts clicked through hundreds of aerial drone photographs of marine iguana populations, counting the number of iguanas and their location patterns in each photograph.
“As long as the photographs are pretty good, the estimates are also quite good,” MacLeod said, who started the project in 2015. The project now has over 13,000 volunteers. MacLeod watched the Iguanas from Above evolve from an “experimental” time-saving research technique into a vibrant, inclusive community bent on conserving such evolutionarily-unique creatures.
“It's been really nice to interact with the public like this, to really have them involved in conservation, but in a new way,” MacLeod said.
“It's quite accessible for people who can't do other types of conservation — not everybody has the privilege to be able to go to the field.”
Photo: MacLeod, third from right, with her field team (December 2021). Courtesy of Amy MacLeod.
Iguanas from Above uses the citizen science platform “Zooniverse” to address this issue. Zooniverse began as an astronomy site for identifying deep-space galaxies and has since hosted projects ranging from counting cells in Gingko leaf fossils to analyzing human baby sounds. On the Iguanas from Above Zooniverse page, participants aren’t trekking through the volcanic cliffsides — nor are they operating Galápagos drones themselves — but they are the trusted recipients of drone pilots’ photographs.
Here’s how each “iguana census” works:
- Drone pilots take photos of Galápagos coastlines, piloting the drones from boats
- Those photos are uploaded to the Zooniverse page
- Community members go online to that page and scroll through photos, counting and categorizing the iguanas, while following detailed instructions on classification protocol
- Team of scientists validates and interprets data in order to estimate population numbers
The project offers volunteers the chance to participate in the conservation of the Galápagos from the comfort of home.
Among them is Pamela Vans, a Canadian volunteer who lives with multiple sclerosis and other chronic health conditions. Vans, who has analyzed over 50,000 images, engaged so consistently with volunteers in the online initiative that she was promoted to forum moderator.
“[The project] provides an opportunity for someone like me to surmount health challenges and make an actual important contribution to citizen science,” Vans said.
During her involvement in the project, Vans experienced four heart attacks and a stroke, leading to multiple surgeries and a month-long stay in the hospital.
In spite of her health challenges, which prevent her from traveling to the Galápagos in-person, Vans felt she could still make a valid and valuable contribution to citizen science.
"I quite liked the idea that even though it was a small contribution, I could do it as much or as little as I wanted, and if my health took a bad turn, or I had a rough day, I could just drop out, and no-one would give me any grief about it,” Vans said.
“It gives [me] the opportunity of self worth… and on really challenging days of relentless pain and immobility, something else for the brain to focus on. Something beyond our own selves, and an awareness of a larger place than our own bed and thoughts.”
Why counting counts
For Vans and other volunteers, manual counting is not realistic. The rocky, pristinely isolated habitat of marine iguanas is truly a “larger place” that is relatively inaccessible to most tourists and even researchers.
Photo: MacLeod climbs to sample on Darwin Island. (Kathleen Preissler; courtesy of Amy MacLeod)
It’s therefore difficult to keep track of current numbers of marine iguana species in the first place — and traditional data collection methods don’t cut it. For nine of the 11 subspecies of marine iguanas, no reliable data existed prior to MacLeod’s project, according to the Galápagos Conservation Trust.
If a species like the marine iguana is inadequately monitored, it is harder to detect threats, influence IUCN conservation status, track changes over time, or make conservation recommendations. The marine iguana is currently designated as “Vulnerable,” which adds relevance to locating iguanas and determining how many of them are left.
Photo: A recovering "mess" of iguanas scatters the beach, rebounding from a famine period. (Joy Reeves)
Why protect the Marine Iguana species?
One notable trait about marine iguanas in particular is that they experience extreme population fluctuations — essentially “boom and bust” cycles — based on water temperature and weather, which affects how much algae is available as their food source. During El Niño years, anywhere from 10 to 90% of the marine iguana population can be wiped out. El Niño periods are marked by naturally-recurring warmer sea surface temperatures across the tropical central and eastern Pacific Ocean, usually every two to 10 years, whereas their counterpoint La Niña refers to the “cold phase” when sea surface temperatures drop. When El Niño arrives, the Galápagos islands are positioned in the heart of the warming seawater.
Climate change exacerbates the frequency and intensity of El Niño years, which naturalists worry endangers marine iguanas.
“Weather changes so drastically [...] you would think that a very strong animal like that would make it, but they don't,” said Maricarmen Ramirez, a Galápagueña naturalist aboard National Geographic’s Endeavor II with Lindblad Expeditions.
The result? In abnormally warm years, drone images and photographs reveal sprawling, starved iguana carcasses scattered in eerie graveyards across islands like Fernandina. Often, the iguanas are clumped so densely that the beach itself is scarcely visible.
Photo: Closeup of marine iguana skull. (Joy Reeves)
Yet, Ramirez explains, scientists suspect that marine iguanas have methods of adapting to cyclical famine, such as shrinking their own body size during food shortages or holding their breaths for up to an hour underwater to maximize feeding time. At the very least, the Iguanas from Above project may offer a baseline “count” to gauge the recovery and success of different subspecies.
“The populations do tend to rebound quite well in the La Niña conditions. But, you know, if they're gone, they're gone,” says MacLeod.
The Future of Iguanas from Above
Iguanas from Above is an ever-evolving project, and certain unknowns — such as the potential role of machine learning in the project — are still unfolding. Currently, humans are still the best iguana counters, though algorithms may eventually master the meticulous task of counting.
According to MacLeod, the project is new enough that her team still employs a validate-as-they-go strategy, where the team periodically checks the data to ensure that volunteers’ conclusions are similar to their own, and ensure that the drone method lines up with population estimates from combined or traditional methods like counting iguanas from the land.
So far, at over 191,790 specimen classifications in Phase 4 alone, their methods have been found more reliable than traditional ones. Even with this progress, it is too early to draw all encompassing datasets from the project. “We're adding new methods to the toolkit of conservation,” MacLeod said.
The use of drones in similar projects is a promising next step for conservationists. Drones are quieter, cheaper, more precise, and safer to scientists than alternatives such as helicopters and small planes. In fact, Iguanas from Above's drone surveys offer some unintended environmental benefits, including their potential to illuminate plastic-heavy areas and spur cleanup efforts in places that were previously unknown, volunteers say.
Can “Imps of Darkness” bring light to conservation topics?
Perhaps one early achievement of the project is its simplest one: stirring a widespread love for marine iguanas.
Marine iguanas, nicknamed “Imps of Darkness” by Charles Darwin's crew and used as inspiration for the animated beast Godzilla, appear to lack the public adoration or charm of sea lions, penguins, and other charismatic counterparts. According to Vans, very few volunteers expressed initial adoration toward the iguanas.
“Yet, most people who get involved in this project end up caring greatly about this species and the environmental health of the Galapagos,” Vans said.
Iguanas from Above spotlights the uniqueness and resilience of these creatures — the only aquatic iguana species in the world — who first hitched a ride to the Galápagos on a raft of vegetation, drifted onto an island, and started adapting as early as 15 million years ago.
Photo: Movement of a marine iguana. (Joy Reeves)
The sheer unlikeliness of their adaptation mirrors the equally unlikely convergence of the Iguanas from Above community. And, for volunteers like Vans, there persists a parallel undertone of resilience, evolution, and adaptation—one that comes with citizen science participation itself.
"I think it brings different people different things. [...] They find it rewarding. They find it interesting and engaging. And I think they're really contributing something very helpful, which I think they can be and should be proud of. Citizen science enables that,” MacLeod said.
“Since we are all intimately linked with everything else that's alive on the planet, [citizen science] should matter to us for not just interest reasons, but for our very existence.”
In loving memory and honor of Pamela Vans.
Editor's Note: Lindblad Expeditions made this story possible by providing Planet Forward Storyfest winners with an experiential learning opportunity aboard one of their ships. Planet Forward thank Lindblad Expeditions for their support of our project.