Rolex prize winner Brad Norman developed a photo-indentification system which uses whale shark sightings and photography around the world as a conservation tool.

Credit: Kurt Amsler/Rolex

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SINGAPORE: A method of recognising whale sharks based on the starry night sky has won Australian marine biologist Brad Norman a US$100,000 prize from a watchmaking company.

Norman's is one of five projects to have been awarded a Rolex Award for Enterprise. He will accept the award at a lavish ceremony tonight at the Concert Hall here in Singapore.

The money will help to raise the profile of the world's biggest fish and perhaps save it from extinction, Norman said. "It has been a species that has been hard to get any money to do any work on ... I've been in awe of these creatures for a long time and they have been a passion. Hopefully now we'll be able to encourage a bit more support and resources to get the job done."

Whale sharks grow up to 9 metres long, and feed by scooping krill and plankton into their gaping mouths. Very little is known about the animals, and until recently when snorkling and scuba-diving became more popular, they had been spotted only rarely in the wild. Norman has shown that their numbers are few - and declining.

Norman was awarded for his work in developing computer software that scans photographs of whale sharks and recognises the pattern of white spots on their grey-blue hides. Each shark's spots are different: as unique as a human fingerprint.

After spending hours laboriously cataloguing and manually checking photographs of the sharks, Norman decided there had to be an easier way. A software-developing friend in the U.S., Jason Holmberg, introduced him to Zaven Arzoumanian, an astronomer with the U.S. space agency NASA who suggested that shark spots might be a bit like trying to recognise patterns of stars in the sky.

Between the three of them they took the mathematics which help the Hubble space telescope to find star patterns - the Groth algorithm - and applied it to whale sharks.

These days snorklers and scuba divers the world over are encouraged to take a snap of the area just to the rear of the sharks' gills and email it to the whale shark database, www.whaleshark.org. By compiling photos from around the globe, Normal hopes to gain a clearer picture of where the sharks migrate to, and how long they spend in different areas.

It was this element of global interaction that intrigued the judging panel. Tommy Koh, one of the judges, said Norman's project emphasised the involvement of everyday people in a conservation project, thereby bringing it closer to their own lives.

Norman said he hoped the excitement of being personally involved with the life of a whale shark would open people's eyes to marine conservation issues in general.

"I want to try to make citizen scientists out there; local communities to take a sense of self-stewardship about their own environment. And if I can facilitate that, that's where I want to go."

Other Rolex prizes were awarded to a Thai professor, Pilai Poonswad who has literally converted poachers into gamekeepers, thus protecting the hornbills of the Thai peninsula; British zoologist Rory Wilson for developing a new kind of animal tracking device; Alexandra Lavrillier, a Frenchwoman who is preserving Siberian nomadic culture; and Chanda Shroff who has taught fellow Indian women to protect their handweaving traditions.