“…The ecological value of ROV video, which is often collected haphazardly, remains unclear (Macreadie et al, 2018;McLean et al, 2020). Several studies have opportunistically harnessed ROV footage used in routine oil and gas platform inspections for scientific purposes, both for determining marine growth (Gass and Roberts, 2006;van der Stap et al, 2016;Thomson et al, 2018) and examining fish assemblages on and around offshore platforms (Pradella et al, 2014;Sih et al, 2022) and pipelines Bond et al, 2018;McLean et al, 2022b;Ierodiaconou et al, 2023). Challenges with haphazard data collection and poor video quality were common among studies, however scientific advances were made in each case.…”