Whether a large and fuzzy social media sensation or deep-sea slug slunking around the ocean's Midnight Zone, there are still so many exciting animals on Earth just waiting for their close-up. In that spirit, here are the 11 of the most exciting animal stories that Popular Science covered this year. A wildlife filmmaker and biology doctoral student took what could be the first picture of a newborn great white shark. Filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside biology doctoral student Phillip Sternes were looking for sharks near Santa Barbara on California's central coast. Most great whites are gray on top with white bellies, but Gauana's drone camera showed a roughly 5-foot-long shark pup that had more white on its body than normal.

Image-based re-identification of animal individuals allows gathering of information such as migration patterns of the animals over time. This, together with large image volumes collected using camera traps and crowdsourcing, opens novel possibilities to study animal populations. For many species, the re-identification can be done by analyzing the permanent fur, feather, or skin patterns that are unique to each individual. In this paper, we address the re-identification by combining two types of pattern similarity metrics: 1) pattern appearance similarity obtained by pattern feature aggregation and 2) geometric pattern similarity obtained by analyzing the geometric consistency of pattern similarities. The proposed combination allows to efficiently utilize both the local and global pattern features, providing a general re-identification approach that can be applied to a wide variety of different pattern types. In the experimental part of the work, we demonstrate that the method achieves promising re-identification accuracies for Saimaa ringed seals and whale sharks.

Whale sharks can carry up to 300 babies at once--at different fetal stages and from different fathers. Zebra sharks experience "virgin birth." These are but a mere sampling of the decade's most fascinating shark discoveries. Some 500 known species of these toothy fish ply our planet's waters, ranging from bite size to bus size, and scientists are still becoming acquainted with most of them. Since 2000, when scientists discovered shark populations were collapsing around the world, research on sharks has ramped up across many fields of study, from paleontology to neuroscience to biomechanics.

Anyone working in data management and data science can attest to the challenge and time-consuming nature of mapping a set of data from a new source into a platform where it can be cleaned, validated, and ultimately analyzed and used to train algorithms. After all, your algorithms are only as good as the data used to train them. Now imagine if these data sets are coming from hundreds of external users who have employed any number of systems to collect this data, from Excel files to actual shoeboxes full of photos. That is the challenge that non-profit wildlife conservation machine learning and artificial intelligence service provider Wild Me has faced over its more than a decade of operation. The organization builds open software and AI for the conservation research community.

Did you know that scientists have identified only 1.5 million species out of the 10 million estimated on Earth? And many of those species are vulnerable to extinction. Thanks to the efforts of the non-profit organization Wild Me, the gargantuan task of wildlife preservation is getting a much-needed assist from citizen scientists who photograph and video wildlife when traveling the world, plus high-tech solutions such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine vision. The Amazing Ways Wild Me Uses Artificial Intelligence And Citizen Scientists To Help With ... [ ] Conservation To make the progress on wildlife conservation that's necessary, it's going to take pulling data out of proprietary data sets and joining them into collaborative data sets. This is precisely what Wild Me and its Wildbook platform can do for the effort.

An autonomous'robot shark' has been deployed at a Devon harbour to devour plastic waste before the tide takes it out to sea. The'Wasteshark' was designed to tackle the scourge in ocean pollution and protect the marine area's local wildlife and ecosystem. The high-tech aquadrone was released in lfracombe Harbour, the first in the UK following successful launches in five countries, including South Africa and UAE. An autonomous robot'shark' has been deployed at a Devon harbour to eat up plastic waste before the tide takes it out to sea. The'Wasteshark' was designed to tackle the scourge in ocean pollution to protect the marine area's local wildlife and ecosystems Wasteshark can'swallow' up to 60kg of debris in one trip and if running five days a week could clear 15 tons of waste from waterways every year, according to experts.

Give Jason Holmberg 10,000 zebra photos and he'll find the specific individual zebra you're looking for, no problem. "It could take two minutes," he said. Holmberg is executive director of the nonprofit Wild Me. The Portland-based organization has developed a digital tool called Wildbook that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite wildlife identification. In tandem with citizen science, Wildbook is able to condense years of human work -- like photographing thousands of animals and identifying each by hand -- into a matter of weeks.

Give Jason Holmberg 10,000 zebra photos and he'll find the specific individual zebra you're looking for, no problem. "It could take two minutes," he said. Holmberg is executive director of the nonprofit Wild Me. The Portland-based organization has developed a digital tool called Wildbook that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite wildlife identification. In tandem with citizen science, Wildbook is able to condense years of human work -- like photographing thousands of animals and identifying each by hand -- into a matter of weeks.

Give Jason Holmberg 10,000 zebra photos and he'll find the specific individual zebra you're looking for, no problem. "It could take two minutes," he said. Holmberg is executive director of the nonprofit Wild Me. The Portland-based organization has developed a digital tool called Wildbook that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to expedite wildlife identification. In tandem with citizen science, Wildbook is able to condense years of human work -- like photographing thousands of animals and identifying each by hand -- into a matter of weeks.

'I'm an accidental environmentalist,' said Richard Hardiman, who runs a project called WASTESHARK. He says that while walking at his local harbour one day he stopped to watch two men struggle to scoop litter out of the sea using a pool net. Their inefficiency bothered Hardiman, and he set about trying to solve the problem. It was only when he delved deeper into the issue that he realised how damaging marine litter, and plastic in particular, can be, he says. 'I started exploring where this trash goes – ocean gyres (circular currents), junk gyres, and they're just full of plastic.