If you find yourself in line at the grocery store, waiting for a meeting, or just plain bored - WATCH FISH! The clips are only 20-60 seconds long!
For the second season, we have a fantastic underwater webcam system that records river herring as they migrate up the Mystic River and allows YOU to help us document the size of the migration by watching video and recording the number of fish you see.
The website has some new features:
A leaderboard that allows you to track the number of videos you have watched and how many fish you’ve seen
A live estimate of the run this year that responds to data you submit. Your countsfeed into a statistical model that estimates the size of the migrating population, and you can see the effect your new count has right away.
A data page that summarizes count information and water quality day by day throughout the season.
Until recently, herring have not been able to reach key breeding habitat in the Mystic watershed for over a century. So their presence and recent amazing population increase, due to the addition of fish ladders in dams along the river, is an incredible ecological success story.This is now the largest herring run in the commonwealth of Massachusetts!
Be a citizen scientist. Help promote a great story of ecological restoration that’s happening mainly out of sight in the most urbanized river in New England. Compete to be on the website leaderboard.
Happy Counting!
P.S. If you want to see what a LOT of herring look like in one minute of video, click here.
