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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the somebody-get-that-whale-a-tissue dept.

A spouting whale is a majestic sight, spraying everything around it with minuscule droplets of whale snot. (Okay, so it’s not technically snot—it’s more like lung mucus.) But aside from being pretty, that spray, which scientists call “blow,” is a coveted substance in marine biology. Rich with DNA, hormones, viruses, and bacteria from the whale’s respiratory tract, the goo can give researchers clues about a whale’s stress levels and overall health. So, naturally, scientists decided they needed to try collecting the stuff with drones.

Last month in Stellwagen Bank, Massachusetts, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and NOAA used a hexacopter to collect blow samples and snap photos of 36 humpback whales, gathering data to compare the pod to their brethren in more pristine Antarctic waters. And that’s just one of the conservation research groups that’s decided to capitalize on drones. Ocean Alliance, a nonprofit in Gloucester, Mass., recently launched a Kickstarter for their “Snotbot,” which proposes to collect data from whales off the coasts of Patagonia, Mexico, and Alaska.

These multi-coptered machines are driving a small renaissance in biology and conservation research, allowing researchers—marine scientists especially—to study subjects and places they can’t typically reach. Drones are getting better at carrying scientifically useful payloads: things like more complex sputum samplers, and heavier, better-quality cameras. And as those high-quality drones get cheaper and easier to outfit, they’re helping to answer ecological questions that scientists couldn’t even begin to ask before.

Some of those answers will come from the new snot samplers. But researchers have already been able to learn a lot from simple visual drones—building rich profiles of individual whales that would make Herman Melville proud. Last year, scientists from NOAA and the Vancouver Aquarium tracked killer whale pods in the Pacific Northwest with a hexacopter outfitted with a hi-res camera (the same one used at Stellwagen) that allowed them to accurately measure the whales’ length and width. They followed individuals as they frequented a certain patch of ocean, getting a fine-grained peek into the life and times of the pods—pregnant females, frolicking youngsters, and unusually skinny whales at the beginning of the study who had disappeared by the end.

Data from the cameras can tell researchers about more than size. Take something called entanglement history. “Some whales seem to have a knack for getting entangled in fishing gear,” says Wayne Perryman, a cetacean researcher at NOAA’S Southwest Fisheries Science Center who helped develop NOAA’S hexacopter. “Is that animal compromised for the rest of its life, or does it recover and it’s just fine?” With hi-res drone images, scientists can pick out scars on the whales’ backs from nets and past tagging events, and compare the body data of whales that have been netted to those who haven’t.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @05:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @05:57PM (#222428)

    Gonna have ourselves a longpig barbecue.