W
e’re steaming through the surf, over
crests and into the blue yonder, and
already there’s a buzz of excitement on
board. We’re about to do something nobody
has done in these waters for a very long time that is, we are about to hunt down humpba ck
whales and move in for interception.
Our ship is nimble and agile, and our keen
eyes scan the almost never-ending horizon
from the onset - all of us are looking for that
telling signal that the whales are here. I’m
told that sometimes you can be on top of
them in minutes, but today we will have to
wait. It’s nearing the last days of the season
and the whales are in a hurry now, for the rich
feeding grounds off Antarctica are calling to
them, and they are hungry.
Our expedition leader is the highly respected
marine biologist Dr Jan-Olaf Meynecke,
an expert in cetacean studies as well as
the aquatic ecologies of the Queensland
coastline. Olaf is one of the very few people
in Australia who has the scattering of
necessary permits to go after the whales,
but no whales will be harmed this day - our
boat is instead fitted with a quadcopter in
place of a harpoon and a human landing pad
as its slipway.
It’s the snot that the good doctor is after,
more specifically the tiny fragments of mucus
that are ejected in the salty spray that whales
exhale as they arrive at the surface for their
next breath - and it’s a commodity that is not
easy to come by. But before that we have
to find them, so we traverse the swells and
search the seas - as we mentioned earlier,
the baron scope soon falls away to reveal
abundance and life in every direction.
Our first shout comes from the bow, whales
spotted to the north ... well, we’re told at
the very least there’s something alive in the
water over there. A quick burst of power
and we scoot in to a patch of commotion
and flashes of contrast under the water. It’s
a false alarm as a small pod of bottlenose
dolphins surfaces a few metres from the
boat. The dolphins are momentarily curious
and bob above the waves for a look. Our
strange appearance must do little to interest
these animals that lead such rich lives built
around high-speed recreation, complex
relationships and the reported pursuit of
happiness.
We plod off eastward again, and I get to
asking Olaf about his research - about the
wild idea of the drone scooping up whale
snot. He tells us that it’s an extension, or
rather the evolution of an idea from afar “There are different methods, I’ve just heard
about a colleague from another university,
they’ve been doing a trial just using a long
pole and of course that would give you much
more volume of mucus, or whale snot, but
if you don’t want to harass the animal and
you just want to be at a distance you need
to have some sort of remote system that can
capture the whale snot. There was a study
from 2007 or so in the US where they used
a remote-controlled helicopter, but it was
actually fuel (petrol) powered so it was really
big and noisy, and was about US$20,000, so
it was way out of the scope of any realistic
ongoing research of marine mammals. That
led me to the idea that what if we could have
something remote controlled that could
capture the snot ... but doesn’t cost $20,000.
“So the idea is to use something that doesn’t
have much impact at all on the animal,
because we want to capture information as
it occurs in the natural environment, not if
the animal is stressed, when it might actually
release hormones that we don’t want to
capture - we want to see what the animal’s
status is at that very point in time, without
being harassed or impacted by us - every
good researcher should try to reduce the
impact that their research has on the target.”