The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred on April 20, 2010 and leaked oil into the Gulf of Mexico near the Mississippi River Delta until July 15, 2010. The manmade disaster spilled a volume of 210,000,000 gallons of oil and affected an area of 68,000 square miles. The total damage to marine life is still unknown.
The Ocean Alliance is a Gloucester, Massachusetts based organization founded in 1971 that “strives to increase public awareness of the importance of whale and ocean health through research and public education” (Ocean Alliance, 2014). The Ocean Alliance believes that the dispersants used by BP’s oil cleanup efforts were designed not to mitigate the effects of the oil on sea life, but rather to hide the oil. The Ocean Alliance believes oil from that spill is still having adverse effects on marine life in the Gulf of Mexico.
In 2013, the Ocean Alliance teamed with Sea Shepard Conservation Society under a program called Operation Toxic Gulf. The ongoing operation aims to study the long-term effects of the oil spill on whale life. The operation is pioneering new research techniques to study whales without causing harm or stress of any kind. In order to accomplish this, the organizers of Operation Toxic Gulf turned to the Olin School of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. In 2014, the school unveiled their whale studying creation, the SnotBot.
The SnotBot is a small multicopter Unmanned Aerospace System (UAS) that will collect blow samples from the blowholes of whales. The UAS is made to launch from a whale-watching vessel as soon as a surfaced whale is spotted. It will immediately fly to the blowhole of a whale while under the control of an operator from the vessel. The SnotBot will then collect a sample of the blow as the whale exhales via a surgical sponge mounted on the bottom of the UAS. The SnotBot will then return to the vessel where the sample will be cataloged and later analyzed.
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| The SnotBot in action |
The blow samples from whales contain lung lining and mucus that will be analyzed to collect biological data such as stress hormones, bacteria, toxins, viruses, and DNA. However, for Operation Toxic Gulf to determine if whales in the Gulf of Mexico are experiencing health problems, the same datasets must be collected all over the world. This is where the SnotBot is extremely beneficial.
Before the use of SnotBot, whale blow had only been collected using fixed wing aircraft that would follow spotted whales. The aircraft had to fly low and slow, and it was theorized that their noise would cause the whales stress, therefore throwing off the hormone levels on collected samples. The old approach also proved to be difficult and expensive.
The Ocean Alliance has reduced the total cost of the SnotBot to $2,850 per unit. The cost includes a First Person View (FPV) camera for operations beyond the line of sight. Additionally, it contains a separate onboard camera for high definition video recording. The low cost will allow researchers worldwide to collect and share similar whale data.
The Ocean Alliance has one last hurdle before using the SnotBot to study whales, at least in the United States. The FAA currently does not allow aircraft to fly less than 1,000 feet over a whale. Researchers at the Ocean Alliance and the Olin School of Engineering conducted SnotBot testing on inflatable whales. The data was included in a research study that argued the SnotBot would not cause harm or stress to whales. The study was included in their application for an FAA Certificate of Authorization or Waiver (COA). The COA for the SnotBot has not yet been approved.
References:
Olin College of Engineering (2014). Saving Whales: One Drone at a Time. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.olin.edu/news-events/2014/saving-whales-one-drone-time/. [Last Accessed 15 November, 2014].
Ocean Alliance (2014). SnotBot Archives. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.whale.org/tag/snotbot/. [Last Accessed 15 November, 2014].
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