From scanning for bats to counting jellyfish, citizen science in action in Hong Kong

In the waters of Victoria Harbour near the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, three jellyfish glide amid the seaweed, floating twigs and marine litter, showing that people don’t have to venture far out to sea to spot them. These jellyfish, says expert John Terenzini, are Cyanea nozakii, known locally as Lion’s Mane. “It’s a bit confusing because Lion’s Mane is used for a different species internationally – that’s the problem with common names versus scientific ones,” he adds. Terenzini, who recently completed an environmental management master’s degree at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), wants to share information about jellyfish through his Hong Kong Jellyfish Project (hkjellyfish.com), a citizen science initiative. It’s not just animal species, but also the environments they inhabit, that benefit from citizen science projects, which feature interested citizens helping to find and collate scientific information, often by monitoring a species or habitat. Terenzini recently founded the jellyfish project to find out more about the abundance and distribution of jellyfish in Hong Kong waters. Participants have already lodged 266 observations and spotted 32 species. Jellyfish are found globally, from surface waters to the deep sea, Terenzini says. They have been seen 3,700 metres beneath the surface in the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific Ocean, the deepest part of the ocean. As both prey and predator, jellyfish play important roles in the food chain, he says. Hong Kong’s most venomous creatures – beware, some can kill Served as a delicacy in some parts of the world, jellyfish are increasingly being used in medical research, Terenzini says, their collagen used as scaffolding for growing new body parts, while their fluorescent protein is used as a biomarker in medical diagnostics. “The Agriculture Fisheries and Conservation Department states that six species of jellyfish are found in Hong Kong, but citizen science projects showing images of jellyfish taken in Hong Kong waters reveal that there are more than 20 species,” Terenzini says. The project also aims to fill a data hole relating to jellyfish stings – the tentacles trailing from a jellyfish body can inject venom from thousands of microscopic barbed stingers. “The Hong Kong Hospital Authority does not keep records of stings, and many are likely taken care of on-site, so there is a lack of data,” he says. Summer in Hong Kong is jellyfish season, and Terenzini says the project is open to anyone, in particular lovers of water sports. “I want a network of citizen scientists to take photos and record simple data of jellyfish they see in Hong Kong waters, then submit the observations through one of several research portals.” These portals are the project’s website hkjellyfish.com, and iNaturalist, created in 2008 as a citizen science project to map and share observations around the world. Posts can also be made on Instagram and Facebook. US-born Terenzini says he is looking for information about environmental conditions that lead to a better understanding of jellyfish, including blooms – substantial increases in a jellyfish population in a short time. Also part of Hong Kong’s burgeoning citizen science movement is John Allcock – and it’s hard to resist giving him the nickname “Batman”. During the day, he is a research assistant at HKU, where his focus is on birds and the trade in wildlife. At night, he’s often on the bat trail, or posting on Bats Of Hong Kong, a Facebook group he set up to help people better understand the much-maligned flying mammal, of which there are more than 1,400 species globally. Hong Kong, he says, has 26 species, including the bamboo bat, one of the world’s smallest mammal species, measuring about 4cm in head-body length with a tail about 2.5cm long. Allcock says bats play important roles in the nighttime world, from eating insects to pollinating plants and dispersing seeds. But they are often misunderstood, especially when it comes to disease: Reports suggesting bats as the source of the coronavirus have not helped their reputation. “Like other animals, bats carry diseases, but the risks of transmission to people are extremely low and only occur in close contact or when hunted for food,” he says. Last month Allcock led a survey on the short-nosed fruit bat, a common species in Hong Kong that he says has adapted well to urbanised spaces. He said 40 people took part, surveying more than 7,000 Chinese fan palms, the species’ preferred habitat, across all districts of Hong Kong. “We found 346 bat roosts, and a total of 1,498 bats,” says Allcock. The districts where most bats were found were Yuen Long, North District, Wan Chai, Kwai Tsing and Wong Tai Sin. Allcock plans to share the survey data with the government. “I hope it will help inform tree planting plans in urban parks and also provide information about future developments so planners have an idea about bat numbers and what can be done to help conserve this species.” He also has some advice for anyone who stumbles on a roost of bats. “Appreciate them and enjoy the fact that they’re eating the mosquitoes. Don’t worry about them – just leave them alone,” he says, adding people should call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals if they find an injured bat. For the past few years, the Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) has been part of FreshWater Watch, a global citizen science project in which individuals and communities monitor, protect and restore their local water resources. The team, led by OUHK’s Fred Wang Fat-lee recently published data from two years of water sampling and analysis across seven of Hong Kong’s streams and rivers. Conservation in Hong Kong: citizen scientists work to protect nature To see how reliable the data was, Lee – along with colleague Steven Xu – compared it with official data collected from the government’s Environmental Protection Department (EPD), and found a number of correlations, Lee says. Hong Kong might be small (its land area is 1,110 sq km, or 429 square miles), but it’s big on biodiversity, with more than 3,300 species of plants, 57 species of mammals, more than 540 species of birds, 198 species of freshwater fish, 86 species of reptiles, 24 species of amphibians, 236 species of butterflies and 123 species of dragonflies. Hong Kong is 1 per cent of the size of the adjacent Chinese province of Guangdong, but has one-third as many amphibian species as its larger neighbour. It also has one-third of the bird species in China. That makes Hong Kong an ideal place to engage in the annual City Nature Challenge, a global citizen science event with the aim to document urban biodiversity and a “fantastic opportunity to reconnect with nature”, says Shaun Martin, head of community education at WWF-Hong Kong. More than 430 cities worldwide are expected to take part in this year’s event, from April 30 to May 3, making it the largest ever synchronised biodiversity monitoring event (244 cities took part last year). “All you need to do is log pictures of insects, birds, plants, etc on iNaturalist, but all participants are urged to follow their own Covid-19 guidelines and maintain social distancing,” says Martin. Last year, Hong Kong recorded 17,137 observations of 2,945 species, more than any other Asian city that took part. Other citizen science initiatives include WWF-HK’s One Planet Youth programme that trains participants to work alongside conservation teams to monitor black coral in Tolo Harbour, in the northeast New Territories, and track a firefly population at the Mai Po nature reserve in the northwest New Territories. Smriti Safaya, education director at CitizenScience. Asia, a regional network that promotes the use of citizen science, wants citizen science embedded in Hong Kong’s curriculum as a valuable educational tool. “When children know the data they collect is being used for ‘real’ research and has a purpose, they take it very seriously … they are very precise,” she says. Hong Kong’s citizen science community is growing – and there are many ways to get involved. The Lung Fu Shan Environmental Education Centre, established in 2008 by HKU and the EPD, operates a range of citizen science projects. In December, it called on members of the public to help with a population survey of black kites, and this month held a butterfly event to try to identify new varieties in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s rich marine life accounts for a quarter of the 22,629 species in the whole of China, despite Hong Kong waters amounting to just 0.03 per cent of China’s seas, so the ocean is an ideal place for budding citizen scientists. They can join the 114°E Reef Fish survey, a citizen science project on a mission to strengthen the conservation of coral fish in Hong Kong.