- It's a pretty fortunate thing that we get to do
to be able to be so close to these majestic animals.
And you only get a brief second at it,
but you remember every one of them.
- My lab is fascinated with how life operates
at such extreme body sizes.
- Baleen whales are the group of the largest animals
that have ever lived.
So that's why we study them -
because they face all these complex behavioral
environmental interactions
that no other animal has ever experienced.
- We love to look at blue whales
'cause blue whales are krill feeders.
and they have this really stereotypical feeding style.
But then we look at humpback whales,
which can feed on both krill or can feed on fish.
And so we can compare, how do they feed differently?
Working at sea: very hard to do generally
Working at sea with large marine vertebrates:
extremely hard.
- You can sit there on the Serengeti and measure,
how often is the lion eating, et cetera,
but only recently have been able to do that for a whale.
Like how often does it eat?
How much does it eat?
How much energy does it take to eat?
What is its basal metabolic rate?
What's its heart rate?
And those are big questions that we can start to answer now.
- We have spent the last five or six years
developing this technology.
I like to call this arts and crafts.
We put together these sensors
that are essentially over-the-counter sensors.
And by putting these together in 3D-printed modules,
we get to innovate and try out different tag designs,
and they can tell us exactly
what the whale is doing under water.
We know the orientation of the whale, three dimensions.
We know the whale's speed.
We have hydrophones inside the tags
so we know when the whale is calling
and communicating with other whales.
- We have a driver who knows how to drive around whales
and a tagger stands on a pulpit,
and the driver maneuvers them through the whales
and brings them up just as a whale is surfacing.
And the tagger reaches out with this pole -
It can be quite long -
and then just sticks it onto a whale with a suction cup.
- These suction cups will stay on for 12 to 24 hours
and then they pop off and float to the surface
and then you can recover them.
- We then coordinate with other boats and the larger boats
that have the drones and the prey mapping equipment.
And then we can put all of that complementary data
together once we assemble
all those teams together at once.
- Monterey Bay is one of the most amazing places
to see whales, but also to do research on whales.
It's highly abundant, it's very productive waters.
So there's a lot of food.
And I think that attracts a lot of these whales,
right to our shores.
- The Monterey Bay Canyon is a really unique place
where you have cold water coming up from the depths
and spilling out over the canyon edges.
And so you get this really deep water environment,
really close to shore.
Like to get blue whales
15 miles from the harbor mouth is pretty unique.
And we start seeing humpback whales
within 50 meters of harbor sometimes.
- When whales are around, the ecosystem is doing well.
Even 20, 30 years ago, the humpbacks that we see
by the dozens, if not the hundreds,
in the bay behind us, were very few.
And now there are thousands of whales in this bay.
And so we know that the bay in general is doing much better
than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago
just by the presence of whales.
- So we have studied species that are consistent here
and are understudied - that we don't know everything about.
And so there's a lot of research
to be done on these animals.
Every time we put out one of these tags,
we learn something new and exciting.