Drones are remaking marine mammal research
In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the largest oil spills on record. In the aftermath of the disaster, whale scientist Iain Kerr visited the area to study how the spill had affected sperm whales, aiming specialized darts at the animals to collect tissue samples the size of a pencil eraser.
It wasn’t going well. Every time his boat approached a whale surfacing to breathe, the animal would disappear beneath the waves before he could reach it. “I felt like I was playing Whac-A-Mole,” he says.
As night fell, a whale dove in front of Kerr and covered him in whale snot. The unpleasant experience gave Kerr, who works at the conservation group Ocean Alliance, an idea: What if he could collect that same snot by flying over the whale somehow? Researchers can glean a lot of information from whale snot, including the animal’s DNA sequence, sex, pregnancy, and the composition of its microbiome.
After numerous experiments, Kerr’s idea evolved into what is now known as the SnotBot: a drone equipped with six petri dishes that collect snot from a whale by hovering over the animal as it surfaces and exhales through its blowhole. Today, drones like this one are deployed to collect snot all over the world, and not just from sperm whales: they also collect this scientifically valuable mucus from other species, like blue whales and dolphins. “I would say drones have changed my life,” says Kerr.
It’s not just mucus
Collecting snot is one of many ways drones are being used to study whales. Over the past 10 to 15 years, drone technology has made great strides, now becoming affordable and easy to use. This was a boon for researchers. Scientists are “finding applications for drones in virtually every aspect of marine mammal research,” says Joshua Stewart, an ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University.
