Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

.jp.j. That's y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Annie Sneed.

It's called the whale shark. And, as the name implies, it's huge. In fact, it's the largest

living fish in the world. But there's still much unknown about this big animal.

They're very elusive. They're difficult to catch up with.

Al Dove, an expert on the biology of whale sharks and vice president of research and conservation at Georgia Aquarium. But citizen scientists are helping Dove and other whale shark experts get a fuller picture of this marine creature. Tourists, residents, and professional scientists have documented the fish for an online database called the Wild

Book for Whale Sharks by taking advantage of each shark's unique pattern of skin spots.

So the wild book architecture was really the brainchild of Zayvina, Zumanee and Jason Holmberg,

and they adapted an algorithm that was used by the Hubble Telescope for recognizing patterns in Starfield

photographs from astrophotography and realized that the spots on a whale shark are really very much

the same idea, that whether we can identify individual whale sharks by their spot patterns.

And with the help of wow shark scientists like Brad Norman, who is the lead author on this study,

they were able to bring that into a citizen science format that allowed people to upload photographs and use these powerful computer algorithms to recognize individual whale sharks. And at that point, sharks stop being random animals that you meet in the ocean and they become individuals with stories and histories and futures that are yet to be written.

And that's what makes it so seductive as a citizen science project.

Whale shark watchers simply snap a photo of the skin pattern on one side of the fish, preferably the left side, says dove.

And then you upload a picture of that animal to the wild book website and the people on the back end will tell you whether that

animal has ever been seen anywhere before. And that's very exciting. And it's kind of a win-win

prospect because if the animal's never been seen before, then you've added a new animal to

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