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I wrote the last newsletter on the way to the International Conservation Technology Conference (ICTC), so there is lots to catch up on since last time, but let's bite a few bites.

ICTC, February, Peru

I gave a talk about Spyfish and a workshop with post-it notes and stickers about what happens between building technology and using it in the field, what goes wrong and what works).

The two main takeaways from the workshop were “oh, we all have the same problems” and “we should talk to each other more”.

As time passes after an event or experience, I have a metric for “how good it was” based on what makes up my normality: how many hours a day are directly influenced by that experience. Opportunities, co-workers, friends, thoughts, projects, many bits of a typical October day have threads connecting it to ICTC. It was interesting to be at a conference where everything felt relevant, people doing the variousest variations of what I am doing, driven, and very kind. Such a great moment of hope-buffer building, so needed for fuel in-this-day-and-age. We even had a marine group 🌊

The title of my Spyfish talk was: “When will the pipeline* be ready?” and after all the chats at ICTC I had a big boost of energy and knowledge, and pushed the pipeline into the (kind of) ready stage! We get boxes around fish, and counts on a dashboard, and experts and citizen scientists whose contributions feed back into the data. And all it takes is one command.

*the way I describe pipelines to people who don’t do tech or pipelines: a bunch of slides, attached to each other, and you drop one type of data on one side (in our case videos), and then the data slides around, and transforms, and then comes out on the other side processed in some way (in our case, the maximum number of fish of a species in a single frame).

Fun:

Credit: Spyfish, Wildife.ai & The New Zealand Department of Conservation

Even more fun:

Credit: Spyfish, Wildife.ai & The New Zealand Department of Conservation

I just stayed in Peru, most of the time in Cusco, working on Spyfish and going for walks around the city. Cusco, at 3400 m of altitude, unlocked something deep in me. I lived in the Ecuadorian mountains for a year in my late teens, so seeing those same mountains and the humans and the sounds and smells and tastes was home, home, home.

Have you ever experienced a good conference app? Well, yes, ICTC had it, and the people at the Manu Bio research centre wrote on there inviting people for a visit. So, after a 6-hour-long, winding and vomit-full ride (me and my seatmate both had our heads out the window on each side of the car and both vomited throughout, and I wondered: “Do they test the car paint for that level of acidity?”), anyways, we reached the Manu Bio research station and it was all worth it.

**Manu Bio research station, Peru**

Sometimes, I think “fish don’t get enough love”, but then I remember my insect friends and feel like maybe they have it worse (except for butterflies, lol, do you know that a lot of other insect data is skewed to when butterflies are around, which is when people travel to see them, and collaterally collect some other insect data). So, the fact that Manu is dedicated to insect research is very special. Their positioning just up the slopes, close to both the jungle and the mountains, makes it an interesting place to study, for example, how climate change makes these animals move up the mountains.

THE LOVE! So much love for these magicians of the universe (as in, the insects), so many adaptations, roles, ways to hide or ways to look like other insects/leaves/animals, intertwined universes. I learned a lot from the people working there, and the enthusiasm was infectious: I loved bugs before, but I have an added layer of relationship now.

Someone is chilling here! Can you find it?