Last winter, about 3 nautical miles from Sydney, Australia, marine biologist Vanessa Pirotta was finally able to collect some snot.
A PhD student at Macquarie University, Pirotta had been searching for ways to monitor whale health using blow—“that visible plume of spray rising from a whale’s blowhole,” she tells The Scientist. Once considered just water, “it turns out [blow] is a juicy organic mixture of health information, which contains material such as DNA, hormones, and bacteria that we can collect to provide a checkup on a whale’s health.”
Getting close enough to healthy whales to collect this material manually is both dangerous for researchers and disruptive to the cetaceans. Collecting samples from stranded animals, meanwhile, biases researchers’ understanding toward whales that are likely to already be sick, Pirotta says.
But a collaboration with Alastair Smith, a senior drone technician and pilot at Sydney-based company Heliguy, offered another option. On four ...
