COMPETITION NOW CLOSED.
This competition is part of a project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to raise public awareness and interest in research done at the University of St Andrews to improve methods of assessing wildlife populations. To conserve animal populations under threat, we need to know how many remain and whether their numbers are increasing or decreasing. But just finding out how many there are is often surprisingly difficult and fraught with uncertainty.
For example, we know the numbers of many large cetacean species (whales and dolphins) declined enormously during the period of commercial whaling, but for many species it is impossible to know with certainty how many are left and whether their numbers are increasing.
You just can't count all the whales in the sea! With similar survey effort as is currently used to estimate numbers of great whales in the Antarctic, it would take about 500 years to survey every bit of the Southern Ocean! And the Southern Ocean is just one of many oceans in the world.
So we have to estimate whale abundance from partial counts. The estimates have uncertainty associated with them and this uncertainty can be large. Do some estimation for yourself by playing the game WhaleQuest. Enter the competition by submitting your estimate from the game. The better you estimate whale abundance in the game, the higher your chance of winning the prize and going out to survey whales yourself.
 See The Prize link to the left for information about the prize trip on this boat! Following the links on the left to download the game, find out about estimation and get tips to improve your score on the game.
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