I strongly believe that without research, the world would not be where it is today. Whether it’s medical research, research on the universe, research on ants, research is extremely important to learn and to share our learnings with others. The purpose of research is to find new findings, analyze past findings, and to develop further. Research is also used to inform audiences. To me, research allows me to pursue my interests, it allows me to learn new things, and it also challenges me in new ways. It’s comical, because after ‘researching’ online volunteer opportunities, I found one that really interested me, it is an online researching website. It is called Zooniverse.

About Zooniverse

Zooniverse is considered to be the world’s largest and most popular website for people-powered research. Millions of people participate in the research of Zooniverse. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications. Their projects combine contributions from many volunteers, relying on a version of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to produce reliable and accurate data. By having many people look at the data they often can also estimate how likely they are to make an error.

The goal of Zooniverse is to to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.

By volunteering through Zooniverse, I will work together with other volunteers and with research teams on different research projects. A significant amount of this research takes place on the Zooniverse discussion boards, where volunteers can work together with each other and with the research teams. These boards are integrated with each project to allow for everything from quick hash tagging to in-depth collaborative analysis.

The project I will be mainly working on through Zooniverse is called, “Killer Whale Count”. I will help researchers classify different whales and Stellar Sea Lions. The objective of this project is to assess the impact of killer whale predation pressure at various Steller sea lion colonies throughout the western range of the Aleutian Islands by identifying and counting killer whales. The reason why I had decided to devote my time and effort into this service project has to do with my grandfather. He passed away just last year, and he was a huge sea animal lover. He would take me to the beaches in Puerto Rico where we would catch different sea creatures, and whale watch. The beaches surrounding Puerto Rico have long been important breeding habitat for humpback whales. He always taught me how it is important to take care of our planet, especially the creatures of the sea. The entirely western stock of Steller sea lions are listed as endangered and experienced a declines as much as 98% within the last 40 years, therefore understanding potential threats to this endangered species is very important. By volunteering for this project I know I am classifying important research, that will help this endangered species. I do feel like by picking this project, my grandfather would be proud, and if he were still with me today, he would have loved to volunteer and classify this research with me.