Knowable Magazine reports on a new use for remote-controlled drones — to collect DNA samples from whales blowing mucus out their blowholes, and to simply spy on whales from above:
As darkness fell, a whale dove in front of Kerr and covered him in whale snot. That unpleasant experience gave [researcher Iain] Kerr, who works at the conservation group Ocean Alliance, an idea: What if he could collect that same snot by somehow flying over the whale? Researchers can glean much information from whale snot, including the animal’s DNA sequence, its sex, whether it is pregnant, and the makeup of its microbiome.
After many experiments, Kerr’s idea turned into what is today known as the SnotBot: a drone fitted with six petri dishes that collect a whale’s snot by flying over the animal as it surfaces and exhales through its blowhole. Today, drones like this are deployed to gather snot all over the world, and not just from sperm whales: They’re also collecting this scientifically valuable mucus from other species, such as blue whales and dolphins. “I would say drones have changed my life,” says Kerr.
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The aerial perspective that drones can provide is revealing novel behaviors. “I have seen more unique behaviors in the last five to eight years with drones than I saw in the 30 years previous,” says Kerr. In 2025, for example, scientists reported that some whales regularly use pieces of kelp to groom each other by rolling lengths of it against podmates’ bodies — an observation gleaned from 9 hours of drone footage of 25 killer whales, filmed off the coast of Washington state.
This unusual example of tool use among cetaceans would otherwise have been almost impossible to capture. “We would never have seen this behavior without the bird’s eye view that the drone gives us,” says study author Michael Weiss, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Washington.
There’s video footage of drone work with whale researchers at the link.