- [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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