>>JEREMY GOLDBOGEN: The first couple of times you tag a blue whale your legs are shaking and
you're trying to just focus and make sure you get that tag in just the right spot.
>>DAVID CADE: So, you're on this boat and you have about a 20-foot pole and you're
trying to get as close as you can to this animal and you have a four-second window
in which to get the boat close enough to put it on the animal and then get out of the way.
>>GOLDBOGEN: I run the whale biomechanics lab here at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station
in Pacific Grove, California. Our specialty is using suction cup-attached tags that allow
us to track and study whales underwater. So, we use new tag technology to pry into the intimate
daily diaries, is what we call it, of whales as they're swimming and foraging underwater.
>>CADE: People have been fascinated by whales for thousands of years.
They wash up on beaches and people are like, “What is this thing? What is going on?”
They're this massive animal that lives in the ocean and you can only see it at the surface.
And for thousands of years that's kind of how people studied them. They could
study specimens that were killed on whaling operations and they could study the surface
behavior. For that brief moment in time they could study what the animal's doing.
For the most part, at the surface,
these whales are just breathing. So, for most of the life cycle they're not really observable.
They're going down to very deep depths very quickly and doing... something.
>>GOLDBOGEN: So, we take our tags and tagging pole with us as far south as the Antarctic,
as far north as Norway. But we do a lot of our work right here off the coast of California
where in Monterey Bay we're really lucky to have one of the densest concentrations
of blue whales in the world. So, in just an hour's cruise from a nearby port here,
you can be surrounded by blue whales in the summer months of July, August, and September.
Since we started in 2014, we have collaborated with a small company to
build over 50 of these tags and we've now tagged several hundred whales.
>>CADE: This is one of my favorites. It's got the forward-facing and the backward-facing
camera here. It's got a GPS sensor here. GPS is a little bit challenging on a whale.
So, you can't get GPS signals underwater, so you actually only get the signal for that
three-second period where you're supposed to find every satellite in the sky for that three-second
period as the whale surfaces and then goes back underwater. It's got the sensor package up here
in the front. It's just this little circuit board, is actually all the accelerometer, magnetometer.
The reason that we've been able to do some of this work over the last 10 years is largely because
cell phone technology has driven these sensors so small that there's a market for that and then we
can take advantage of that. But what's cool about these tags is that they are all suction cup based.
So, it doesn't actually hurt the whale at all. It doesn't puncture any skin or anything like that
and it basically just sticks on to the whale's back and just stays on there for six to 24
hours. Then eventually the suction fails and then the tag will float to the surface.
And then we'll recover it with this antenna that's sticking up out of the back there.
So, we have this long pole and a boat and what you'll see out here on the side is this whale
start to surface up and we're basically timing it so we can do an approach from his side so we don't
bother him. And then right when he's committed to surfacing, we're going to accelerate right up to
him and on the end of this pole, which is about 20 feet long, we'll drop this tag onto his back.
Huge team effort, right? Like you have to work with the driver,
you have to work with the other people on the boat to actually take pictures,
you have to work with the spotters. You usually have about six or seven people
out in the water actually working to get this data on these animals.
So, if I was going to show you what that same process looked like from the tags’
perspective, on the left-hand side you have this forward-facing part of the camera and
on the right-hand side you have the backward-facing cameras. Basically,
the whale's going to approach here, come up on the left-hand side. We're going to accelerate
up there. We're moving faster and now there's the whale and now we're on the back of a whale.
Up here on the left-hand side is going to be the whale's head and back here is the tail.
And this right here is the antenna from the tag that we actually use to recover the tag.
>>GOLDBOGEN: They're sampling at really high resolution. So,
for example, the whale's movement is measured at several hundred times a second.
>>CADE: As technology's improved and our sensors have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller,
that's easier and easier to do, and to get more and more data over a longer time span with more
resolution. So, we can finally now start to interpret and determine
what are these whales doing when they go underwater.