Whale Tagging and Why It's Done | Continent 7: Antarctica

My opinion, the most important piece of research coming out of the Antarctic right now is understanding how different species cope with the changing environments: the rapidly warming air, the increased amount of precipitation, the decreased amount of sea ice.

So, there's something special about the three or four areas right in here that there's always whales. We're trying to measure the underwater behavior and movements of the whales, get an estimate of their size, and we're trying to understand what whales need to survive and the manna food that they eat.

If you don't eat enough, you're not gonna reproduce. If you don't reproduce, it's a very quick process into your population not growing. These tags are basically like a smartphone that record the angle of the whale, whether it's rolled over on its side, the heading of the whale, the depth, and the speed of the whale.

And it does that hundreds of times a second. It also records video, which is awesome because we can then sort of corroborate the things that the sensors are telling us with what we actually see the whale do. It's got two 720p cameras in there; we can get about nine hours of continuous data, and all of that packaged together gives us a really precise estimate of the health of the animals down here.

Tagged data and UAV data combined is gonna be opening new worlds, really. So, let's find some whales.

Yeah, let's do it! We're in Wilhelmina Bay, one of the locations that we've worked in for a long time, and we're gonna try and deploy one of the video recording multi-sensor tags on a humpback. These animals move over big distances very quickly.

They're a real pain to work with because they're difficult to find. Do you guys want to get the drone in the air? It's fun to be in a bad spot.

What's that? There it is! Oh nice, yeah, that's good! When we're approaching these whales, it's definitely a high-risk kind of situation. If it's flu and the zodiac, you would flip us over with that much... you know, trouble.

You probably have five or six minutes in that water at the most before hypothermia would set in, and it would be game over. Anywhere you can put it, it will happen. But the work is definitely not over.

The suction cup tags archive all the data on them, so we have to retrieve that tag to get anything back. These animals get as curious about us as we do about them. It's looking at you, and it's kind of wondering what you're doing there, and we're asking the same kind of questions.

Lars, correct me if I'm wrong. This is the first-ever flight in the Antarctic, right, for this equipment?

Yes, that's correct! Couldn't ask for more except for Lars, Tobias, a couple of drinks.