26/10/2025
Reporting on the number of dead marine animals is WOEFULLY under reported with many journalists misrepresenting the data. News outlets often conflate the "number of observations" with the "number of mortalities".
You might read or hear about 70,000 + deaths. No, that's the number of observations from this one project. Each observation might contain hundreds (or more) deaths. The actual number of marine creatures dead thus far actually numbers in the billions.
Please make noise about this so the issue is not swept under the soggy carpet. Janine Baker, is a marine biologist with decades of experience and one of the people behind the Marine Mortality Event in iNaturalist.org. Our guest in episode 422, Johanna Williams, tells the story about what she does, personally, to contribute to this effort, and you'll find that the episode helps put the work of "citizen scientists" into perspective.
Janine has posted the following in the SA Surf and Bloom public Facebook group and it makes for important and chilling reading. As one of her commenters noted, the reporting is so lax, so bad, it would be like saying to a reporter, how about I sell your house for $24,000 instead of $2,400,000. Not sure the authorities are in a rush to correct the figures, either. This is the age in which our short, smartphone-polluted attention spans are a gift to those who want to hide disastrous news.................
It is so, so disappointing to see - after 8+ months - the media still seriously misrepresenting the SA marine mortality events citizen science project content.
The data set (currently 71,000 observations / records) collectedly documents hundreds of thousands of marine mortalities in the embedded counts data, out of the millions that have died (billions if small shells, worms and crustaceans are included).
For example, 20,000 leatherjackets were counted over distance at two locations this weekend alone!
Today's publication on the black beach snot stated "at least 34,000 animals have been killed by the bloom, according to citizen scientist observations".
Please, just stop. If you can't report more accurately, then don't!
I even saw a science magazine article misrepresent the data set the other day, saying 54,000 marine animals have died in SA.
It is an insult to the thousands of hours that people around SA have spent counting, photographing and uploading February to October morts data to iNat, since 1st week of April. Had enough of the public misrepresention of enormous Statewide efforts, collectively by more than 1,100 people, with ~ 20 people directly involved in the counts and data prep in a major way for our analysis and public reports that are forthcoming.
The wildly inaccurate media reporting also grossly misrepresents the catastrophic scale of the impact.
It is also a complete insult to the value of citizen science data in South Australia. The data set detailing impacts on more than 600 species is of enormous value - for so many reasons - but the media trivialises it, using ridiculous numbers.
I even saw this highly valuable public data set misrepresented in the Senate Inquiry in this way, with counts data mistaken for mortalities!
It is also frustrating to see some people in the science community - including national organisations - commandeer the public data set, describing (using inaccurate numbers) in print articles what "we" know / what ""we" have gathered, when they have had zero input to this massive statewide effort, at any stage.
PS The picture below is of Johanna Williams carrying out her monitoring at Glenelg while gulls flock overhead.
