World Wide Eyes: Social Media-Assisted Wildlife Research. Assessing Supplementary Feeding Areas for Eastern Australian Humpback Whales as a Case Study.

Across five migration seasons (2020–2024), 256 social-media and platform records for Eastern Australian humpback whales identified three recurrent Supplementary Feeding Areas: Sapphire Coast, Port Phillip/Bass Strait, and southeast Tasmania.

• Why it matters: Conventional marine mammal surveys are constrained, making it difficult to detect and monitor mid-latitude feeding that may supplement whales’ “feast-and-famine” strategy along migratory corridors.
• What they did: The study systematically compiled humpback whale feeding records from Facebook, Instagram, and Happywhale, then compared passive versus active citizen-science sources to quantify documented feeding events and identifiable behaviours.
• The result: Social-media records substantially increased documented feeding events and more often enabled feeding behaviour identification, while temporal recurrence across 2020–2024 supports that some “opportunistic” feeding may be recurrent supplementary feeding.