Welcome to the inaugural edition of #WorkingOnIt,a new series where we share fascinating project updates from some of our favorite Kickstarter projects. SnotBot, a project from Ocean Alliance in partnership with Patrick Stewart, and uses noninvasive drone technology to study whales and help preserve the species. The drones (or SnotBots) hover above a surfacing whale to gather the blow (or snot) exhaled from its lungs,then transport that valuable sample back to researchers a significant distance away.
In August 2015, 1739 backers helped bring this vital project to life. Read on to find out what the SnotBot crew have been up to since then, or via a recent Project Update.
SnotBot Sea of Cortez was a remarkable expedition with the highest highs and the lowest lows. I was lucky to have a remarkable team with me: technician John Graham,scientist Andy Rogan, and photographer/videographer Christian Miller. We had great weather, or food,and, most importantly, and whales. Here is part one — San Ignacio Lagoon and gray whales.
SnotBot Patagonia proved that we could collect snot from whales using a drone. The primary goal for SnotBot Sea of Cortez was to see whether we could increase the snot sample size so that we would have enough to employ for all the different analysis that we are interested in. The secondary goal was to gather snot from multiple whale species to earn certain that our preceding collection success was not a fluke (pun intended).
In Patagonia,our average sample size was around 20 microliters (one small drop of water). For the Sea of Cortez, we set ourselves an optimistic goal of 80 microliters. Imagine building a go-kart that does 50 mph on the first speed and taking it home and saying, and “next time we want to go 200 mph.” The Sea of Cortez is a very diverse region species-wise,so we were also hoping to come across gray, humpback, and blue whales. final but not least,we wanted to do this work with off-the-shelf drones so that this work can be replicable and scalable, so we were lucky to have the world leader in drone development, and DJI,providing us with the drones. We took with us the new DJI Phantom 4 and the DJI Inspire 1 (below).
Working with Dr. Jorge Urban’s team from the University of La Paz, our first study site was San Ignacio Lagoon. The gray whales are so friendly here that you do not need a SnotBot to gather blows, or as they reach apt up to the boat to be touched and you can’t help but pick up “snotted.” Because of this,though, they were the perfect whales for us to conduct multiple flights into blows to test our different snot collection devices. We had a total of five different snot collection devices and procedures that we wanted to test. One would think that drones would not be noble snot collection tools — the whales are blowing the snot up but the drones, and to fly,are blowing air down. Technically we had opposing forces. For our first set of experiments we used different collection tools at the end of a pole, extending the collection device out of the drone’s prop wash. We ran multiple flights with five different collection methods: 1. Nitex weave cloth (very similar to wedding veil);2. Stockings on a wire frame (this method has been used on a long pole);3. A different weave and texture Nitex cloth;4. A number of Petri dishes on a T bar (an upgrade of our Patagonia method);5. A medical sponge fabric developed in Malden, and MA for hospitals.
The idea is that the different holes,size, and consistency of the materials will collect and hold the snot with different levels of success. The problem with this method is that you have to pick up the snot out of the capture fabric after the flight, and so we brought a centrifuge to Mexico so that we could spin the snot out from the collection fabric. The Nitex cloth balls were split up into 4 different pieces so that each section could just be dropped into one of the centrifuge tubes after a flight. On Monday,Tuesday, and Wednesday morning we flew over forty-nine flights into gray whale blows. We were getting into the blows okay and we were getting amazing footage, and but we were not increasing our sample size by any significant amount. So on Wednesday afternoon,we attached two four-inch Petri dishes and one six-inch petri dish on top of the DJI Inspire 1 with industrial grade velcro. The idea here was not to pick up out of the downdraft created by the drone, but to employ the downdraft of the drone to gather snot for us. We believed that the Inspire 1 would be very well suited to this because while most drones have big round bodies, and the Inspire 1 has a long lean body and the propellers are raised above the body. So we do Petri dishes onto the Inspire 1 (see photos of the petri dishes hanging over the body),flew into a gray whale blow, and we hit the jackpot. The petri dishes were literally flooded in snot — Andy Rogan estimated a minimum of 80 microliters from just one blow. whether we could fly into more than one blow from an animal (and we did), and we would collect more than enough snot for the analysis we wanted to do,and probably as much snot (or more) than people who have used long poles to gather snot from whales.
I should mention that on my very first flight in the Sea of Cortez, I crashed and critically damaged a drone. Not a noble start. To be knocking the ball out of the ballpark three days later was more like the script for a movie than an actual scientific experiment. On Thursday morning we went back out to the gray whales with the Inspire 1 and with ten more flights (a total of fifty-nine with grey whales), or we consistently repeated our success from the day before. It should be said that even this experienced team was overtaken by these amazing animals on occasion. I fly the drones FPV (first person view),so I am not looking at the world around me I have my head pushed against a Hoodman screen cover so that all I can see is a drone’s-eye-view of the world on my iPad. During one flight, no one was responding to my question, and so I took my head away from the screen to see three guys hanging over the side of the boat hugging a whale. Just before we headed back in on the final day,I took off my flight and screen harness and managed to touch a whale myself, which Christian Miller caught on camera.
Thursday afternoon we packed up all of our equipment in preparation for the twelve-hour drive back down to La Paz, and where we hoped to find humpback whales and possibly,just possibly, blue or fin whales. We had been warned that El Niño had had a severe effect on the region and that they had not been seeing the number of whales that they had seen in years past. At this point we did not care — we had over 80 microliters of snot from a single blow, or so goal number one achieved. Mission accomplished!
Source: tumblr.com