© Christian Miller
The lives of whales
New technologies allow scientists exciting insights
Whales can capture our imagination like few other animals. Their immense size, complex behaviours, beauty and charisma contribute to our perception of them as intelligent, enigmatic and perhaps even relatable animals. But how much do we truly know about them? As ANDY ROGAN explains, new technologies are helping us to learn more about these mysterious beasts.
Much about whales is still a mystery to humans—and that’s a major problem if we hope to protect them. The issue is that whales pose a number of challenges that make them difficult to study.
For example, scientists can observe animals on land all day, or tranquilize, sample and fit them with long-term tracking tags to monitor their movements around the clock. But whales live in the open ocean and spend much of their lives beneath the surface, where we cannot follow.
Even other marine animals (such as turtles) and all but the largest of sharks are small enough to be caught, tagged and sampled, but many whale species are too large and powerful for that. For those with relatively small home ranges, we can set up long-term studies of their daily behaviours and movements—but whales’ home ranges are vast, often encompassing the waters of many different countries. They can travel thousands of miles.
The result is that whales remain a bit of mystery to us.
Studying whales with robots, drones and tags
Fortunately, emerging innovative technologies are helping scientists overcome these challenges. Autonomous ocean-going robots, such as WaveGlider, are traversing the ocean to collect data on where whales spend their time and which species inhabit particular stretches of ocean. For example, one such study is helping scientists understand humpback whales’ movements across the Hawaiian archipelago.
Data tags, which stick to whales using non-invasive suction cups and are packed with sensors, are giving us glimpses into what whales do underwater. A paper published in 2021 demonstrated that whales influence ocean ecosystems more than scientists previously realized, for example through greater prey consumption and nutrient recycling.
Ocean Alliance, an American non-profit organization, is at the forefront of this new field. Our tool of choice: drones.
The idea to use drones started with a plan to collect biological samples from whales in a non-invasive way. Whales expire a cloud of vapour when they come to the surface to breathe, and the cloud contains a range of biological compounds that contain insights into whale health. The vapour, or “snot” includes genetics data (with information about the structure and health of the whale population), hormones (such as stress and reproductive hormones that offer insights into how many females in a pod are pregnant), and microbiomes (which could be a new way of monitoring whale health).
© Ocean Alliance
Learning about whales thanks to the SnotBot®
Ocean Alliance developed a drone that can fly through this spout and collect the respiratory sample. We gave the drone the somewhat tongue-in-cheek name of SnotBot.
When the SnotBot project began in 2015, learning what worked best was hard work. The first few expeditions were challenging. At first, we collected only a small number of poor samples.
Our major breakthrough came in 2016, when Ocean Alliance took SnotBot to Alaska. The pristine sub-polar ecosystem there provided an ideal environment in which to perfect the tool. In summer 2016, vast swarms of krill led enormous numbers of humpback whales to congregate in a relatively small area. With so many whales around, all continually exhaling huge clouds of vapour, the team was able to test out new methods to perfect the SnotBot protocol.
Since then, SnotBot has been an enormous success. As mentioned, collecting data on whales is difficult enough—but collecting biological samples (which are crucial to understanding any animal’s health) is even more challenging. Scientists have been collecting biopsy samples from whales for many years, but that approach involves getting a research vessel within six to nine metres of a whale and shooting it with a biopsy arrow, which can be stressful for the whales.
But with SnotBot, researchers can collect biological samples in a minimally invasive way (the whales rarely seem to show any kind of reaction to the drone or awareness of its presence). Ocean Alliance has now provided protocols and guidelines for dozens of scientific teams on every continent. More and more researchers are turning to drones as a non-invasive method of collecting biological samples from whales.
Whales face an uncertain future. There are myriad threats: longer-term dangers, such as climate change, noise pollution and chemical pollution, as well as acute, direct threats, such as ship strikes and fishing gear. Increasingly, scientists are concerned that these different threats can act in concert. The climate crisis, ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements working together have been blamed for the increasingly desperate plight of the North Atlantic right whale.
But new technologies, such as SnotBot and those referenced above, offer new hope. They give us a better chance to understand whales and ensure their long-term survival.
© Christian Miller
[1] As documented in the following studies and several others:
Atkinson, S. Rogan, A. Baker, S. Ragdag, R. Redlinger, M. Polinski, J. Urban, J. Sremba, A. Branson, M. Mashburn, K. Pallin, L. Klink, A. Steel, D. Bortz, E. Kerr, I. 2021. Genetic, Endocrine, and Microbiological Assessments of Blue, Humpback and Killer Whale Health using Unoccupied Aerial Systems. Wildlife Society Bulletin, Volume 45, Issue 4. https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wsb.1240
Costa, H. Rogan, A. Zadra, C. Larsen, O. Rikardsen, A. Waugh, C. 2022. Blowing in the Wind: Using a Consumer Drone for the Collection of Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) Blow Samples during the Arctic Polar Nights. Drones, Volume 7, Issue 1. https://www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/7/1/15
