Robotics Manager Chris Zadra and I headed off to Hawai’i on February 1 to work with Ed Lyman’s whale disentanglement team to trial and discuss new drone-based methods in support of disentangling large whales. Iain with a line-cutting hook. This was our second year working with Ed and his amazing team and while we were there, we had an opportunity to go out on a couple of whale disentanglement events that enabled us to get a much better handle on the process and problems.  I’m excited to report that as a consequence of this trip a number of different pieces came together ..read more

Oman, officially the Sultanate of Oman, is a country located in West Asia. It is situated on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and spans the mouth of the Persian Gulf. It shares land borders with Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, while sharing maritime borders with Iran and Pakistan. The capital and largest city is Muscat. Oman has a population of 5,492,196. The coast is formed by the Arabian Sea on the southeast, and the Gulf of Oman on the northeast. An Ocean Alliance team is at present working ..read more

Dear Friends, Well, Baja 2023 was a tough one. We always set ourselves a high bar, and we got the job done. But it wasn’t easy. We had three overall goals: To conduct focal follows of blue and fin whales. (This this entailed tagging a whale, collecting multiple Snot samples from it, and collecting photogrammetry and behavioral data.) To work with two different film crews to get the story of drone tagging out to the world. To work with James Fahlbusch from Jeremy Goldbogen’s lab at Stanford University, using our drone deploy system to attach a heart rate monitoring tag to blue and fi ..read more

Dear Friends, Our trip to Maui has been incredibly productive and we still have five days left. Day one was set up and planning. In the morning we sat down with Ed Lyman and the Resource Protection and Monitoring Team with the Hawaiian Island Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. In the afternoon we got in a few OEM familiarity flights with Ed’s team on the DJI M210 and the DJI M300.  We have three drones with us on this expedition two DJI M210 ‘s that have become our primary tagging drone and a DJI M 300 that is our entanglement response test bed. The M210 and the M300 are Enter ..read more

Written by Bailey Thieben There are a lot of great organizations doing great things for whale conservation, but not everyone has the means to work with them directly. No matter where you live or who you are, here are some tips and resources to help you do your part in whale and ocean conservation. If you live near the ocean…  It is often easy to feel a need to help whales when you see their environment and its destruction first hand. If you live near the ocean, or have contact with marine communities and environments, here are some things you can do. Practice whale safe boating Reduce bo ..read more

At the end of September, Insituto de Conservación de Ballenas, our partners in the Southern Right Whale Research project, began seeing reports of dead southern right whales in Golfo Nuevo, Península Valdés. Between September 24 and October 11, 30 dead right whales were recorded.  Scientists hypothesized that the whale deaths were caused by the ingestion of algal blooms (red tide) that was present in Golfo Nuevo. Researchers from ICB and UC-Davis were able to perform necropsies on 6 dead whales that were accessible and not badly decomposed and were able to collect partial samples from anot ..read more

Fifty years ago, Congress passed banner legislation designed to protect our nation’s ocean and coasts.  The legislation shaped our past 50 years and will continue to shape the future. Part of this legislation was the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which Congress passed in response to growing concerns that certain species and populations of marine mammals were in danger of extinction or had been depleted as a result of human activities. With this legislation, the primary objective of marine mammal management was to maintain the health and stability of the marine ecosystem and, when consiste ..read more

  The Massachusetts Environmental Trust has invested more than $20 million in environmental grantmaking awards for more than three decades. This year, the Trust’s Aquatic Animal Conservation Grantmaking Program awarded $495,321 to 11 programs across the state that will restore aquatic habitats, rivers and watersheds, and protect endangered species, including at-risk sea turtles and the rarest large whale, the North Atlantic right whale.  Ocean Alliance has been awarded $29,950 to collect data pertinent to the conservation and management of large whales, including the critically ..read more

Clearly Ocean Alliance is interested in innovation. I have two personal convictions: 1.  I believe that the environmental problems we currently face are not going to be solved through traditional methods alone – I am convinced that we need more moonshot thinking by people who are willing to think outside the box and take risks. 2. We have to collaborate; scientists sometimes are not the best at collaborating since they want to publish the seminal paper that will support their careers and funding.  I often like to joke that we are Ocean Alliance not Ocean Alone, we are serial col ..read more

A letter from Program Manager Chris Zadra What Is The Drones For Whale Research Program? For the last four years, I have been developing Ocean Alliance’s Drones for Whale Research (DFWR) program. Whale research has always been difficult, expensive, slow and invasive to the whales. I joined the team determined to develop new ways to make the research easier, faster, cheaper and non-invasive, and then provide what we’ve learned to other researchers across the world. I’m proud to say that we’ve accomplished our goals and continue to set new goals. Recently, we were the first team to successfully ..read more