Biologist Explains How Drones Catching Whale "Snot" Helps Research

[Matt] Whales are majestic

but very difficult to study creatures.

Taking off, three, two, one.

[Matt] But drones are starting to make

whale research easier, if a bit messier.

This is Snot Bot, yes Snot, as in whales snot.

So what's so cool about whale snot

is they're blowing out not only

the actual sort of whale tissue,

at a very small level but we're getting whale cells

that will have DNA, we're getting the microbiome

and we're also getting hormones, you know the hormones

that can tell us is the animal pregnant,

is it lactating, is it sexually active, is it stressed?

That's Iain Kerr, director of Ocean Alliance

which developed the Snot Bot.

I spoke with him about how drones

are transforming whale research.

Before the drone came along, how did you do

a biopsy on an animal the size of a school bus?

So in our case we'd have quite a large boat

which was expensive and we actually had

a little boom that went out and I would sit

on the end of this boom with a crossbow, okay.

And we'd try to get close enough to the whale

to them biopsy it, where we shoot this crossbow

and the piece of tissue we get would be about

the end of your pinky finger or maybe

the size of an eraser on a pencil

and that little piece of tissue

would have all of this biological data.

But what's interesting here is that

that biological data was more often than not,

legacy data, you know, this is what had happened.

So we're all most interested in what's going on right now

so when you get an exhalation, that's really speaking

to the condition of the animal right then and there

which is pretty exciting.

Certainly the exhaled breath condensate

or whale snot, we're not at that point right now

where we're getting all of the data

that we're getting from the biopsy sample

but the very fact that it's non-invasive is important

and also it's more cost effective.

You know, we can run a drone from a small boat.

When I was sitting on the bow of a boat

with my biopsy crossbow, I almost felt

like I was playing whack-a-mole

because a whale would appear over there

and I'd race over there and then, oh, it would dive

but the whale would appear over there

and I'd race over there and then it would dive

and you know I almost felt like I was sitting

on the bow of the boat ripping up $100 bills

because it was costing a lot of money

and I wasn't collecting the data

and I'm like, god if only I could just like,

fly over there and grab that data

and in fact it was one of these very frustrating days,

we were down in the gulf of Mexico

working with sperm whales after

the Deep Water Horizon disaster

and the whale had dived and it was the end of the day

and I'm like, ah I hadn't got any samples

and this cloud of snot engulfed me

and it was wonderfully horrible,

you know, it was sticky and smelly

and all of those things that technically

a biologist is meant to like, I'm not sure

how much I was liking it at the time.

But that's when I realized, wow,

maybe, maybe I smell an idea here, I smell a solution.

I gotta ask for you to elaborate there,

what does it smell like in a cloud of whale snot?

Well you know guess what, it's almost what you'd think

and it's somewhat dependent on what the animals are eating.

Do you know what I mean, like blue whales

that are eating krill are not as bad as humpback whales

that are eating sand eels, you know,

there's a volume issue here, I mean,

a blue whales lungs are about the size of a VW.

So imagine they're exhaling this,

I mean you are immersed in this cloud of,

you know of the worst bad breath you've ever smelled.

The things you do for science I guess, huh?

That's right, that's right and the things

we're excited about, I mean who woulda thought?

Can you walk us through the development of the Snot Bot?

Maybe some design challenges that you came across

in the beginning and how you surmounted those.

When I started with this, it was a little bit

counterintuitive, 'cause if you think about it,

the whale is blowing up and the drone is blowing down

so the early prototypes, we actually had poles sticking down

you know, the drone was here and the pole was down,

it's like two feet long and at the bottom of the pole

I had sponges and wedding veil and meshes

and what I realized quite quickly,

some of these things that are great at absorbing the blow,

you then had to get them out again

and suddenly now, how do I know that that wedding veil

is leeching, you know, plastic sort of toxicant,

you know what I mean, that would actually affect my data.

But we noticed when we're flying into the blow,

we were getting snot on the top of the drone.

And I think what was going on was that

the drone's sucking all this air in

so if we sort of came up behind the whale,

the snot was already on that trajectory

but it was sucking it back onto our drone

so incredibly counterintuitive.

We just started putting Petri dishes

on the top of the drone.

You collect the snot, you get back on land,

what do you then do to analyze that sample

and what exactly are you looking for?

The drone comes in and we just close the Petri dish.

We take it back to our hotel that night

and there's a wonderful sound of one of the team

with a mask on, they literally have like a car,

a mini car squeegee and they go like, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee, ee

and they suck up the snot into a little cryovalve

that we then send to different laboratories.

You're also able to identify the whales

by the shape of their flukes,

can you talk about how that technology works?

When you're looking at these animals,

it's long been an issue of how can we identify them?

And what's cool is a lot of whales lift their tails up

and basically the patterns on the back of their flukes

are very unique and they tend to

stay with the animal from birth.

Now the flukes can actually get bite scars

and scratches on them but generally

lots of whale flukes have been a very useful way

to track an animal throughout its life.

Which is very exciting.

I do think with drones though, we'll be using

more looking down, maybe patterns on their back,

maybe their sort of pectoral fins

and maybe even their blowhole.

So I think that's gonna change but the fact that

when we fly our drones out to collect snot,

we're recording from the time we leave the boat

'til the time we get back.

Is there any artificial intelligence

involved there in identifying the fluke

or are you doing that all still by sight?

We're doing it by sight, we actually worked

on a project with Intel, they came on board

and used some pretty high computing powers

to help us and we were flying out over a whale

and they actually took the live feed

and interrogated this database.

And while I was still flying, so within

a 20 minute window, they said Iain,

you last saw that whale 10 years ago, 20 miles from here.

So imagine if we knew that animal had been sick

or that animal had been hit by a ship

or that animal had been caught in a net, you know,

or the animal had a calf, knowing what animal

we were working with or knowing the life history

of the whale while we're with that animal

would certainly make the work more affordable,

we'd get a larger data set.

People like me have lived in a world

of sort of data deficit, you know,

when you're studying a rhino,

it doesn't dive beneath the Serengeti

after throwing a bucket of water on you

and appear five miles away,

you can sort of stay with that rhino.

Whales are really difficult animals to study,

you know they disappear under the water,

and maybe spend more of their time underwater

doing the things that really make up their lives.

And that's why it's so exciting that we can look

at these hormone, hormonal clues when the animals exhale

as to what's been going on over the last hour.

And are there any indications that the animals

are at all bothered by Snot Bot,

obviously it's not as invasive as the previous method

but do they panic at all when you fly over them?

Yeah you know what, I think that's a really good question

and actually you need to put me to work,

we have a publication that I'm hoping will be out

within the next month and basically in 370 flights,

we had 14 reactions, to get the permit for the work

actually there was great concern about sort of

acoustic disturbance but what's actually interesting

and we wrote a paper on this and a couple

of other people have written a paper on it.

The high frequency sound doesn't get through the water.

So a low frequency sound like a helicopter

or an airplane, you know where you're like,

whop, whop, whop, whop, does get through the water

but the high frequency sound that might be

incredibly irritating to us, that sort of wah,

doesn't seem to get through the water.

Generally speaking, I think really good question

but data to date suggests it's very minimally invasive.

So what comes next here with your projects with Snot Bot?

I'm still trying to push what other technologies

can we use, we used a thermal camera

to see if we could measure the body temperature

of a whale by looking down the blowhole.

So we're really excited to see if we can

measure body temperature and also then

if the body temperature is elevated,

we'd say okay, what else can we do with the drone

or should we dig deeper on this hormone work.

I'm also very interested in potentially fleets of drones,

can we take almost a three dimensional picture of a whale

with multiple drones, can we do sort of morpho-metrics,

look at body condition to help estimate

the health of a whale and you know,

ultimately, there might even be intervation programs

where the whale has been, had a scar,

it's been cut, it's been infected,

maybe a drone will come along and shoot antibiotics

into the whale to help it deal with its infection.

Using other drones, we have one drone

we affectionately call Ear Bot where we drop the drone

in the water with a hydrophone and record the vocalizations.

And what'll be exciting is if we can land

multiple drones in the water, we might actually

be able to say, wait a minute,

this animal's talking to that animal

and this animal's replying, better understanding

how they communicate with each other.

You know could provide some just

amazing insights into their lives.

[Matt] Thank you for being with us

and good luck out there.

Thank you very much.

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