Fun Shark Tracking App Doubles As Innovative Way To Fund Scientific Research

Ever wondered if there are any sharks nearby? Or where in the ocean great white sharks migrate? Well, like practically everything else, there’s an app for that.

Pioneered by OCEARCH, a nonprofit that studies the ocean, users can download a free shark tracking app called the Global Shark Tracker. The popular shark tracking app, however, is just the tip of the iceberg for OCEARCH. When opening the app, one might notice it also tracks Jimmy Buffet’s tour, and there is a shark named Miss Costa, who is named after the Costa Del Mar sunglasses company.

That's because the shark tracker is coupled with a business integration model — it's the innovative way OCEARCH funds itself and hopes other researchers will follow suit.

Originally, the shark tracker wasn't meant to be such a pivotal point of contact for OCEARCH.

“I wanted to give people a vehicle to be included in the project real-time and it became something I never thought it would be. People piled in, especially students and young kids,” said Chris Fischer, OCEARCH’s founder, about the app to International Business Times.

OCEARCH was founded in 2007, and generates a variety of data about large marine species, specifically sharks. Fischer collaborates with scientists across the world who board the OCEARCH ship to conduct research. The non-profit partnered with 157 researchers from 83 institutions and generated at least 50 research papers.

The Global Shark Tracker app started out as a way to get people interested in the research, Fischer said, but turned into a large component of OCEARCH. The individual sharks tagged and tracked by OCEARCH now have thousands of followers on Twitter. OCEARCH also developed lesson plans for schools around the data created by the non-profit created and tracked in the app.

“All I was trying to do was be inclusive. I just wanted people thinking about the ocean and understand how important sharks [are]; to be part of solving this ancient puzzle of where these massive white sharks, mate, give birth where they live,” said Fischer. “That inclusion just spun off in multiple directions that were much bigger than anything I could have imagined.”

The success of the app helped OCEARCH with their funding model, brand integration and content distributed on a large scale. OCEARCH has partnered with socially conscious companies like Costa Del Mar and Yeti Coolers to fund their research.

“I think there are opportunities for businesses that work with nonprofits or cause-related companies to really look at leveraging each other’s resources, to put that story on a larger stage and consequently raise the kind of funding that’s necessary to continue their great work,” said Holly Rush, CEO of Costa Del Mar, to IBT.

OCEARCH uses its wide reach and people’s natural interest in sharks to help promote products. Companies get to help a cause they care about. For the first through third quarter of 2016, the Shark Tracker app had 240,000 iPhone downloads and 93,000 Android installs. In that same time, they had a possible 6.2 billion web impressions, which OCEARCH estimates at just under a $60 million worth of advertisement value. In the first quarter of 2017, the app had over 469,000 sessions across mobile users.

“[We create] content around our work, open sourcing it across all digital, social and earned media platforms and integrate the brands that fund our work into that content,” said Fischer.

Companies like Costa can harness the buzz created by tracking sharks on the app. Costa even has a dedicated OCEARCH product line that helps fund the research.

“[We’re] thinking differently about the model and how it can be sustainable and impactful for everyone involved,” said Rush. “Everybody wins in this scenario we’re drawing from each other’s strengths and putting together a platform that’s scaleable.”

Fischer, before beginning OCEARCH, was an avid fisher and host of an ESPN show called “Offshore Adventures.” He and Rush pointed out that in a lot of ways in this relationship the scientific community and business community align, both wanting to keep the ocean abundant and sustainable for future generations and to keep selling sunglasses designed for people to see wildlife on the ocean.

Grants are one of the traditional ways scientific research is funded, but Fischer wanted to get away from that model and open-source all of the research OCERACH is helping do.

“The traditional model of great writing all the sciences kind of drove scientists to be working in silos rather than collaborating because they were all competing for the same grants and so they wouldn’t collaborate, they wouldn’t share their data,” said Fischer.

While not a bad thing, Michael Halpern, Deputy Director, Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, stressed that vital questions about transparency be answered while looking at a corporate sponsorship for scientific research.

“It's important to make it [easy] for the public to understand who is behind the [research] so they can evaluate whether it stands up,” said Halpern to IBT, adding that it's also important companies don't attach strings to their research.

While grant money may be scarce, some research might not be as easy to find funding for in the private sector. Public health concerns and other less tangible science might not be as attractive to funders.

“There are questions that are less likely to be asked and research that is less likely to be done,” said Halpern about the possibility of moving to a corporate-only model. “You can go on a great whale watching tour and see the whales you helped save ... but it's harder to see when a toxin is removed [from the environment].”

But, Fischer said the government, across both parties, has not funded scientific research enough, and that earth running out of time.

“(We) just want us to get as many people involved as possible so we can open source everything. It’s the opposite of how the old system was. Our two biggest challenges right now are data deficit and time. We don’t have the data to move the system towards abundance and we’re running out of time,” said Fischer.

Through the Global Shark Tracker app and partnering with the business community, Fischer hopes the research he does will help save sharks and other sea creatures for future generations.