In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded within the Gulf of Mexico, inflicting one of many largest marine oil spills ever. Within the aftermath of the catastrophe, whale scientist Iain Kerr traveled to the world to review how the spill had affected sperm whales, aiming specialised darts on the animals to gather pencil eraser-sized tissue samples.
It wasn’t going nicely. Every time his boat approached a whale surfacing for air, the animal vanished beneath the waves earlier than he might attain it. “I felt like I used to be taking part in Whac-A-Mole,” he says.
As darkness fell, a whale dove in entrance of Kerr and coated him in whale snot. That disagreeable expertise gave Kerr, who works on the conservation group Ocean Alliance, an thought: What if he might gather that very same snot by one way or the other flying over the whale? Researchers can glean a lot data from whale snot, together with the animal’s DNA sequence, its intercourse, whether or not it’s pregnant, and the make-up of its microbiome.
After many experiments, Kerr’s thought become what’s in the present day often called the SnotBot: a drone fitted with six petri dishes that gather a whale’s snot by flying over the animal because it surfaces and exhales by its blowhole. At this time, drones like this are deployed to assemble snot all around the world, and never simply from sperm whales: They’re additionally gathering this scientifically useful mucus from different species, akin to blue whales and dolphins. “I’d say drones have modified my life,” says Kerr.
S’not simply mucus
Gathering snot is one in every of many ways in which drones are getting used to review whales. Previously 10 to fifteen years, drone technology has made nice strides, turning into reasonably priced and straightforward to make use of. This has been a boon for researchers. Scientists “are discovering purposes for drones in just about each side of marine mammal analysis,” says Joshua Stewart, an ecologist on the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State College.
