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Drones have been a large part of our history.  Over the many year they have been a mainstay in war technology.  Drones predate manned aircraft and include balloons (Kindervater, 2016).  Modern society sees drones as part of everyday life but drones originally were used by the military to gain an advantage over the enemy.

Kindervater, K. H. (2016). The emergence of lethal surveillance: Watching and killing in the history of drone technology. Security Dialogue, 47(3), 223-238. doi:10.1177/0967010615616011

A Brief History of Drones. (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2018, from https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-brief-history-of-drones

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Unmanned aerial vehicles ( UAVs) are aircraft with no on-board crew or passengers. They can be automated 'drones' or remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs). UAV's can fly for long periods of time at a controlled level of speed and height and have a role in many aspects of aviation.

The first pilotless vehicles were developed in Britain and the USA during the First World War. Britain's Aerial Target, a small radio-controlled aircraft, was first tested in March 1917 while the American aerial torpedo known as the Kettering Bug first flew in October 1918. Although both showed promise in flight tests, neither were used operationally during the war.

During the inter-war period the development and testing of unmanned aircraft continued. In 1935 the British produced a number of radio-controlled aircraft to be used as targets for training purposes. It's thought the term 'drone' started to be used at this time, inspired by the name of one of these models, the DH.82B Queen Bee. Radio-controlled drones were also manufactured in the United States and used for target practice and training.

Reconnaissance UAVs were first deployed on a large scale in the Vietnam War. Drones also began to be used in a range of new roles, such as acting as decoys in combat, launching missiles against fixed targets and dropping leaflets for psychological operations.

Following the Vietnam War other countries outside of Britain and the United States began to explore unmanned aerial technology. New models became more sophisticated, with improved endurance and the ability to maintain greater height. In recent years models have been developed that use technology such as solar power to tackle the problem of fuelling longer flights.

Drones now have many functions, ranging from monitoring climate change to carrying out search operations after natural disasters, photography, filming, and delivering goods. But their most well-known and controversial use is by the military for reconnaissance, surveillance and targeted attacks. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States in particular has significantly increased its use of drones. They are mostly used for surveillance in areas and terrains where troops are unable to safely go. But they are also used as weapons and have been credited with killing suspected militants. Their use in current conflicts and over some countries has raised questions about the ethics of this kind of weaponry, especially when it results in civilian deaths, either due to inaccurate data or because of their proximity to a 'target'.

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The first pilotless vehicles were built during the First World War but drones now have many functions.

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Drones have been traditionally military based but recently have been instituted into civilian lifestyles (Floreano, D 2015). Drones provide a cheap source of surveillance. They do not require as much maintenance as a manned vehicle and they are user friendly to the average civilian. This fact will be the driving force that will show the increased use of drones in the civilian community. They are used by researchers, famers, pilots, and several other industries (Florian, D 2015).

Floreano, D., & Wood, R. J. (2015). Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones. Nature, 521(7553), 460-466. doi:10.1038/nature14542

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Drones have several advantages in marine research.
1. They provide a cheap source for aerial surveillance for researchers.
2. They allow researchers to see things from a different perspective.
3. They can be used to document events.
4.  They allow researchers to go into areas that were otherwise unreachable.
5. Researchers can take themselves out of the equation when looking at animal behavior.
6. Researchers do not have to put themselves in dangerous situations.

Smith, C. E., Sykora-Bodie, S. T., Bloodworth, B., Pack, S. M., Spradlin, T. R., & Leboeuf, N. R. (2016). Assessment of known impacts of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) on marine mammals: data gaps and recommendations for researchers in the United States. Journal of Unmanned Vehicle Systems, 4(1), 31-44. doi:10.1139/juvs-2015-0017

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Drones have created a whole new avenue for researchers.  Some of the disadvantages of drones include but at not limited to:
1. There is no research to identify the effect of drones on the natural environment (Smith et. al 2016)
2. Weather can be an issue with drones.
3. Drones need maintenance.
4. There is a learning curve when using drones.
5. Some places require a drone license to fly a drone.
6. Drones may disturb the organism.

Smith, C. E., Sykora-Bodie, S. T., Bloodworth, B., Pack, S. M., Spradlin, T. R., & Leboeuf, N. R. (2016). Assessment of known impacts of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) on marine mammals: data gaps and recommendations for researchers in the United States. Journal of Unmanned Vehicle Systems, 4(1), 31-44. doi:10.1139/juvs-2015-0017

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Alligator Attacks Drone at the Naples Zoo!

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Drones used for tracking marine organisms are great but being able to use advanced cameras makes the possibilities for using drones in  tracking marine organisms even more trend setting.

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Our friends at Ocean Alliance have been using drones to collect samples from whales, identify them in the wild and track their movements from above. Over the summer they were in Alaska and, with the help of Intel's algorithms, were able to spot different species in the water despite poor visibility. The Ocean Alliance team also got a chance to test out some new equipment, which included a FLIR Vue Pro, a $2,000 thermal imaging camera.

Read more: Ocean Alliance Pioneers Drone Tech in Marine Conservation

Why Use FLIR Cameras For Marine Conservation?

According to a report Ocean Alliance has sent to FLIR, the marriage of drone and thermal imaging technology has a number of potential applications for marine mammal researchers. Ocean Alliance's Iain Kerr believes that "This technology combination holds several key advantages over both vessel and aircraft-based systems."

"The use of drones offers a low-cost alternative to piloted aircraft and enables superior manoeuvrability and access to birds-eye observations, making it superior to vessel-based systems. As both drone and FLIR technologies progress, it is likely that researchers will discover increasingly significant applications for this technology combination."

Read more: Ocean Alliance: Drones, Whales & Intel

Currently, Ocean Alliance has pinpointed several potential uses for thermal imaging.

The first is measuring the body temperature of a whale. For practical reasons, this kind of data isn't yet a mainstream part of whale biology - despite it being central to keeping tabs on the health of other types of mammals. Second is the increased ability to track whales that thermal imaging provides. Day and night, any kind of observable water surface temperature change can indicate whale presence and the direction of their movement.

Then there are behavioural observations researchers can make. It's long been assumed that plenty of social activity happens with whales once the sun goes down. Thermal imaging from above promises to illuminate some of that behaviour.

Other potential uses include determining the severity of wounds and the extent of entanglement in fishing lines, along with keeping track of population growth by counting whale blows.
For a look at what whales look like with a thermal imaging camera, check out the video below:
In some of the clips above you'll notice figures in the psychedelic haze. They may not look like whales, but they are. Kind of. It's probably more accurate to say that what you're seeing is the 'footprints' of the whales. FLIR cannot see through glass or water, but it can see where cold water gets pushed up by the whale's passage. This is a phenomenon that was invisible to the naked eye and the rest of the team's equipment.

MIDAR - The Next Step

Because traditional thermal imaging doesn't reach below the surface of the water, Ocean Alliance is now exploring the possibility of MIDAR technology to get a better understanding of what happens in the deep blue. Until that comes to fruition, underwater imaging may remain just out of reach.

You often hear that there are parts of the solar system that have been more thoroughly explored than the depths of our oceans. Weirdly, with the help of drones and MIDAR sensors, that might not be the case for much longer.

Thanks to Ocean Alliance for supplying the FLIR footage and thoughts on the use of thermal imaging in marine conservation.

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Watch: Using a FLIR Thermal Camera to Track Whales - DRONELIFE

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Our friends at Ocean Alliance have been using drones to collect samples from whales, identify them in the wild and track their movements from above. Over the summer they were in Alaska and, with the help of Intel's algorithms, were able to spot different species in the water despite poor visibility.

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Drones can be used to track turtles. In tracking the turtles the researchers can get an aerial view of the tracks and nesting areas can be identified.
MiSHELL - A Self Aware Drone for Sea Turtle Conservation. (2016, September 18). Retrieved March 11, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obdc3K5Exjs

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MiSHELL - A Self Aware Drone for Sea Turtle Conservation

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Drones were used to to look at the turtle population off the coast of Greece. The use of drones allowed the researchers to get areal views where they could count the amount of turtles in the population and determine the number of males vs female.

Schofield, G., Katselidis, K. A., Lilley, M. K., Reina, R. D., & Hays, G. C. (2017). Detecting elusive aspects of wildlife ecology using drones: New insights on the mating dynamics and operational sex ratios of sea turtles. Functional Ecology, 31(12), 2310-2319. doi:10.1111/1365-2435.12930

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Taking the researchers out of the equation

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Taking the researchers out of the equation

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Drones allow researchers to take themselves out of the equation. Researchers can have an impact on the data they receive.  Many situations cause for the researcher to be placed in the environment with the organism that they are studying.  In doing this they may not be observing natural behavior.  Drones allow for the observation of more natural behavior.  There are also situations where drones can get data for researchers that is otherwise unattainable.  This video is one of those situations.
Drones For Whale Research. (2014, August 18). Retrieved March 11, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl2ezapCGjw

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N. (2017, June 05). Research@Nicholas: New Drones Big Splash for Marine Science. Retrieved March 11, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdJwXgFLhzk

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Research@Nicholas: New Drones Big Splash for Marine Science

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Great white sharks appear to use darkness and depth to ambush prey, marine biologists have learned, thanks to unprecedented footage by an undersea drone that was attacked nine times by four sharks.

In the 13 hours of footage, the sharks cruise low above the sand, swim up to the robotic vehicle and inspect it from all sides, bump it curiously, and burst out of the blue to seize the drone in their jaws. In research published on Monday in the Journal of Fish Biology, the scientists described the first great white predatory behavior filmed from under the surface.

"Most of what we know from white sharks is from electronic tagging, or from what we see at the surface," Greg Skomal, a biologist and lead author told the Guardian. "But when these sharks disappear, what they're actually doing at depth, where they spend their time - we don't have a sense of that."

He said automated unmanned vehicles (AUVs) like his team's let humans observe marine life in comprehensive detail, rather than what scientists can see in the fleeting shark breaches, or their encounters at the surface or through electronic tracking.

From the waters off Guadalupe, an island off Mexico where Pacific white sharks congregate, the scientists observed 10 different individuals, including the 20-foot female named Deep Blue and a local shark nicknamed Bubba. Skomal said that the behavior captured by the drone cameras supports the idea that white sharks dive down as far as 200 meters in order to use light to their advantage.

"If the shark hangs down at a great depth, in the darkness, then its prey swims above it silhouetted and the shark reduces its own likelihood of detection," Skomal said. "The remarkable new observations indicate that [my colleagues'] hypothesis is correct, and the sharks ambush from the darkness."

Most surprising to the researchers, Skomal said, was that "the hunter would become the hunted - the AUV was viewed by the shark as potential prey and aggressively attacked".

Some sharks did not bite but rather bumped the drone, nudging the vehicle with their snout in what the researchers call an "agonistic" behavior - an aggressive or even defensive thump, but not anything like a committed attack. At other times the sharks simply approached the drone to look at it, before moving on along their way.

The AUV also captured sharks swimming close to the bottom when they were in shallower waters, which Skomal said may be "an effort to snatch prey or spook it up from below, or associated with navigation".

Amy Kukulya, one of the researchers and an engineer with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said the "groundbreaking" AUV is so far the first way scientists will be able to study white sharks and other animals in the open ocean.

"Not only do we get to see what they are doing, but we also know exactly where they are and collect data about the physical environmental in which they live."

Although the drone has opened a window into daily life under the sea, white sharks remain mysterious. Decades of research, tagging and diving have done little to answer basic questions about the fish, including what social lives they might have and where they might reproduce.

Around Guadalupe, presumed to be a white shark haven because of the large number of seals that gather there, the drone did not observe any interaction between the sharks.

"They're arguably the most charismatic, if not the most well-known species on the planet," Skomal said, "and it's still one we know remarkably little about some of its most basic natural history."

He added that the undersea drone technology could help broader studies of marine ecology, sustainable fishing and ocean conservation. "We could apply it to studying hermit crabs as much as to great white sharks."
Topics

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Great white shark's predatory behavior captured by underwater drone video

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Great white sharks appear to use darkness and depth to ambush prey, marine biologists have learned, thanks to unprecedented footage by an undersea drone that was attacked nine times by four sharks.

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Why Drones are a game changer

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Image: Fredrik Christiansen / Murdoch University Cetacean Research Unit

Over the Southern Ocean and remote Australian grasslands, there are flying robots - drones, actually, but they're not for purposes of counterterrorism or Amazon deliveries. Rather, these unmanned aerial vehicles are being used by research scientists to sidestep time-consuming, labor-intensive work that was once done by foot, boat, or via expensive plane flights: tracking animal behavior.

While humans have always been curious to learn about the habits of animals, such research is more pressing than ever. Habitat loss and climate change are having dramatic impact on almost all species - estimates suggest as many as 1 in 6 species may go extinct due to global warming. The need to know more is urgent, and drones are changing the game by allowing scientists to be more ambitious and efficient with their studies.

Chris Johnson, an ocean sciences manager at WWF Australia in Melbourne, is involved in whale research in the Great Australian Bight. In the past, he said, a study to, say, observe the size of breeding whales would require flying an airplane at low altitude, and even briefly sticking one's head and camera outside the aircraft at high speed to capture images as detailed as those done by drone during the Bight project.

"Drones actually make it safer for researchers to do very similar work," he said, particularly getting close enough to recognize individual whales. It also costs less: The drone they used in 2016 was an off-the-shelf DJI Inspire 1 Pro, priced at around A$5,600 (US$4,289) total, along with some additional lens, hard drive and battery costs. The team's Bight drone project lasted three months, whereas he estimated that a plane doing the same job might cost roughly between A$3,000 (US$2,298) to A$10,000 (US$7,659) per day.

"It's a win-win tool - it's really changing, really disrupting, whale research - they're seeing behaviors that are very difficult to document by airplane," he added.

For Debra Saunders, an ecologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, drones have also cut down on labor.

While looking at the habits of a critically endangered migratory bird, the swift parrot, she hit up against the shortcomings of traditional techniques. Because it's such a small creature, typical satellite or GPS tags were too cumbersome to attach to the tiny critters, and "by foot" counting methods were too slow.

So Saunders helped develop a drone to do the same work from the air. It can track small transmitters attached to the animal, weighing only about one gram, that send a radio signal back to base camp.

When launched, the drone does a one-minute rotation on the spot looking for the signal of tagged animals in the area and giving Saunders and her team their approximate location. Based on that information, it automatically decides where the next best place is to maximize data collection about the bird's whereabouts.

"With two or three rotations, you can pinpoint where an animal is within 10 meters (33 feet)," she said. "That's like an hour's worth of work in less than 10 minutes."

An imperfect improvement

While drones have already significantly sped up animal research, they still have one glaring problem: battery life.

That's an issue for Johnson, whose work often occurs out at sea. "Some whale research I do that's off the continental shelf of Southwest Australia - that's 25 miles (40 kilometers) away, so you need a different type of drone, which is very expensive," he said.

Meanwhile, in the south of Australiaat the Unmanned Research Aircraft Facility (URAF) in Adelaide, Jarrod Hodgson and his team are using drones to monitor wildlife from koalas to marine mammals.

Hodgson also cited aircraft battery endurance as a factor that would help increase the machines' impact on animal studies, as well as better sensors. "The continued integration of sensors to allow drones to make decisions and fly autonomously, avoiding moving obstacles for example, will also create new possibilities," he said via email.

Ethical questions

At URAF, Hodgson is investigating whether animals are disturbed by unmanned aircraft. After all, there's there's little point in using drones to better understand wild animals if those same aircraft affect the animals' behavior.

So in 2016, he helped write an animal-drone code of conduct. "Currently, we have a limited understanding of the potential impacts that drones may have on wildlife," he said. "We expect that wildlife responses will vary due to factors such as an animal's life history, its ability to detect the drone and also its environment."

Like Hodgson, Saunders noted the aim of any wildlife researcher should be to understand the animal's natural behavior, not its disturbed behavior. If researchers can ensure drones aren't causing a ruckus, the technology could even improve on by-foot research, which can be surprisingly disruptive.

Image: Fredrik Christiansen / Murdoch University Cetacean Research Unit

"Many small animals live in tall grasses, so by just physically going close to the animal [on foot], you're trampling the very habitat that they use and altering their behavior," she said. "This is one of the benefits of using [drones], in that we don't actually have to get close to the animal."

It seems clear that researchers will need to abide by high standards for drones to have impact that improves on traditional methods. While most animal studies require research permits, Johnson also suggested it was also important researchers have proper drone-piloting credentials.

"I think that we do have to be cautious, especially around wildlife," he said. "There are already so many impacts on them, from loss of habitat to climate change no matter what species, so it's important that researchers using drones have proper permits, proper training."

As humans grapple with their role in climate change, it may seem strange that little robotic collections of metal and plastic could make a difference. In the hands of scientists however, they could become powerful tools for understanding animal populations in crisis.

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Why drones are a game-changer for animal research

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Over the Southern Ocean and remote Australian grasslands, there are flying robots - drones, actually, but they're not for purposes of counterterrorism or Amazon deliveries. Rather, these unmanned aerial vehicles are being used by research scientists to sidestep time-consuming, labor-intensive work that was once done by foot, boat, or via expensive plane flights: tracking animal behavior.

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Drones are revolutionizing the whole marine research field

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Laurie Noble | The Image Bank | Getty Images

The data collected by the Wave Gliders includes wave heights, wind speed, temperatures and information about currents, according to Gysin.

"We've actually been through 16 hurricanes and cyclones over the course of the deployment of Wave Gliders and we're collecting data in real time to let people know what's actually happening on the ocean's surface," he said.

Last summer, a Wave Glider in Asia managed to collect weather data during Typhoon Rammasun, where winds reached 145mph and waves topped 45 feet in height.

According to a release from Liquid Robotics, the remote controlled Wave Glider was able to collect and transmit, "vital and rare, real time wave, temperature, conductivity and current data all from the surface of the ocean."

Read More Can fossil fuels ever be 'guilt-free'?

Roger Hine is the CTO of Liquid Robotics. "Robotics are going to really change the way humans interact with the ocean, and we're at the front edge of that, there's a tremendous amount of future for unmanned systems in the ocean... in part because of the fact that we can solve this energy problem and leave them out there for long periods of time."

Hine went on to add that the potential of 'ocean drones' is considerable. "People need to come home to their families, ships run out of fuel," he said. "Robots like this can continue to operate for long periods of time and they will really allow humans to do new things in the ocean and to understand the ocean in a way that we've never been able to before."

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Wave-powered drones map the world's oceans

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Laurie Noble | The Image Bank | Getty Images The data collected by the Wave Gliders includes wave heights, wind speed, temperatures and information about currents, according to Gysin. "We've actually been through 16 hurricanes and cyclones over the course of the deployment of Wave Gliders and we're collecting data in real time to let people know what's actually happening on the ocean's surface," he said.

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Drone technology is new and is constantly changing and revolutionizing marine research

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Meet the Saildrone Tracking Sharks in the Pacific

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Honduras

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I did an interview recently for a New Scientist article, " Whale sharks' secrets revealed by live-tracking aquatic drones", written by Alex Matthews-King.

It's a neat story, so I thought I'd expand on my answers (below). I've pulled some information and quotes from both the New Scientist article and a separate feature written by Stuart Philpott for Sport Diver UK.

Konrad Madej (above left) was the research director at the Whale Shark & Oceanic Research Centre in Utila, Honduras. He led the work featured in the New Scientist article: tracking whale sharks with autonomous "Wave Gliders" from Liquid Robotics.

The Wave Glider is a pretty awesome piece of kit. It's the solar-powered surfboard-type doohickey in the photo above.

Here's a video on how they work:

Whale sharks at Utila

I've spent bit of time looking for whale sharks off Utila myself, so I was really interested to hear about this study. Between 2011 and 2013 I spent six weeks on the island hosting "whale shark research weeks" for Deep Blue Resort (and, unsurprisingly, obsessing over the endemic Utila iguanas).

While I was there, I helped Steve Fox from Deep Blue / Utila Whale Shark Research write a scientific paper: " Population structure and residency of whale sharks at Utila, Honduras ".

That study, based on photo-identification of Utila whale sharks between 1999 and 2011, found that sharks were usually sighted in conjunction with tuna schools. Both the sharks and the tuna were thought to be feeding on the same small baitfish.

Whale sharks can turn up in any month of the year off Utila, so my suspicion was that their presence was related to the movement of productive oceanic fronts rather than any specific biological event.

These sightings data suggested that the sharks weren't sticking around: 78% of them were only seen in a single calendar year.

But what if the sharks simply weren't visible?

I'm not (just) being pedantic here. The seafloor off the northern coast of Utila drops rapidly to over a kilometre depth. Whale sharks can dive to at least 1, 928 m, and tagging data have shown that they often go long periods without approaching the surface.

The sharks could easily be hanging out deeper, only approaching the surface when they're attracted by something - perhaps the sound of tuna jumping around while they feed.

Remotely tracking whale sharks

My last blog article was about the whale sharks at Mafia Island in Tanzania. There, the sharks move inshore to feed on shrimps from around October to February.

When we started tracking the sharks' movements using pinger tags, recording their presence via passive acoustic sensors, we learned that the whale sharks weren't leaving the area outside those months. They were just moving a bit further out from the island, and rarely coming to the surface.

It turns out that the sharks are so resident, we've been able to give many of them names.

That technique, deploying an array of passive acoustic sensors, worked fine in a shallow bay like Mafia. Installing receivers was easy, either by freediving or using basic scuba equipment. It's much more complex in deep water. At Utila, that's where the Wave Gliders come into play.

Konrad's team set two Wave Gliders to patrol 5 km off the north coast of Utila. Each one carried a passive acoustic receiver, "listening" for whale sharks that had been tagged with high-frequency pinger tags. These sounds (inaudible to people) carry well through the clear oceanic waters off Utila. I'm guessing that the receivers would hear a tagged shark if it swam within around 800-1000 m of a Wave Glider.

The Wave Gliders can transmit real-time information on the depth and position of tagged sharks while they are in reception. Konrad told New Scientist that the drones detected one shark at a depth of 90 metres in July, when the team thought all the whale sharks had migrated north toward Mexico.

"With the turbulent weather during these months, it's difficult to find whale sharks feeding as rough waters prevent the plankton, roe and coral spore they feed on from settling at the surface," he says. "So it's great to see they're still swimming at depth, for the first time, via the Wave Glider."

The Wave Glider can move at about three knots at maximum speed, around 5.5 km per hour - pretty quick. For the sake of random comparison, Michael Phelps swims the 100 m butterfly at a bit over 7 km per hour. Whale shark tracks of up to 25 minutes at a time were achieved.

Yay technology!

All well and good, but let's focus on me.

Alex did a quick email interview with me for New Scientist, so I've added that here:

What do you see as the big challenges in whale shark conservation at present?

A big challenge for whale shark conservation has been our inability to locate and follow adult whale sharks. Truly large whale sharks - over 12 m length - are regularly seen at just a handful of remote offshore seamounts. These areas are difficult and expensive to access.

Juvenile male sharks, from around four to nine metres in length, often feed in coastal waters, so we know a lot more about that age group. The problem is, we don't know how much of that knowledge remains relevant as the sharks grow up.

It's a worry for us. Whale sharks are an endangered species, but we know little about where the breeding-age sharks are, or what they get up to.

Do you think the insight provided by current or future drone technologies can help address some of these?

Drone technologies have the potential to provide insights on movement and behaviour that currently elude us. Tracking the movements of these sharks over long periods, while simultaneously sampling oceanographic data, would provide us with improved insight into the habitats they use and the human threats they might be exposed to.

I think there will be some interesting technologies converging over the next few years, such as solar-powered autonomous vehicles like Wave Gliders and the global internet access that companies like SpaceX and Google are working on.

The ability to transmit real-time high-bandwidth data, like video streams, would be huge for us.

Can it be applied to other species?

I think long-term monitoring of adult whale sharks is probably a stretch goal at the moment. These sharks are one of the deepest-diving fishes, to around 2 km depth, and swim 10-15, 000 km a year through the open ocean. They're not easy to keep up with.

Some of the slower-moving, more coastal species will be a lot easier to track. There have even been some interesting initial studies done on basking sharks and white sharks.

That being said, I'll be hugely interested to see what comes out of these initial whale shark studies. The species is constantly surprising us, so any new insights into their behaviour are very welcome.

< Interview ends >

Some quality time with Google has since revealed some neat footage of white sharks trying to eat drones:

Want more shark geekery? Many Utila sharks head north to join the world's largest whale shark aggregation off Mexico each summer. I've written about that here.

If you'd like to read new stories as they're published, and get exclusive updates on new expeditions and that sort of thing, subscribe to my newsletter:

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Whale Sharks & Underwater Drones at Utila, Honduras - Simon J Pierce

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I did an interview recently for a New Scientist article, "Whale sharks' secrets revealed by live-tracking aquatic drones", written by Alex Matthews-King. It's a neat story, so I thought I'd expand on my answers (below). I've pulled some information and quotes from both the New Scientist article and a separate feature written by Stuart Philpott for ...

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How drones are advancing scientific research

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Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been around since the early 1900s. Originally used for military operations, they became more widely used after about 2010 when electronic technology got smaller, cheaper and ...

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Wave-powered drones are being used to provide live tracking of the world's largest fish, the whale shark, for the first time.

Researchers at the Whale Shark and Oceanic Research Center (WSORC) on the island of Utila, Honduras, have just finished a year-long project using autonomous "Wave Glider" drones to patrol for whale sharks and report back on their movements. The team was able to follow along in real-time as the drones relayed the depth and minute-by-minute position of individual sharks.

They found whale sharks feeding off the coast of Utila at unexpected times of year, which shows the potential for this technology to fill some significant gaps in our understanding about the endangered species.

Konrad Madej, former research director at WSORC and lead researcher on the Wave Glider project, says the drones spotted one shark at a depth of 90 metres in July, when it was thought the whale sharks had migrated north toward Mexico.

"With the turbulent weather during these months, it's difficult to find whale sharks feeding as rough waters prevent the plankton, roe and coral spore they feed on from settling at the surface," he says. "So it's great to see they're still swimming at depth, for the first time, via the Wave Glider."

Mature whale sharks can dive to depths of 1.5 kilometres or more and swim 10,000 kilometres a year, making it difficult to locate and follow them. "Just being able to track them over longer periods while sampling oceanographic data would improve our insight into which habitats they use, why and what threats they might be particularly susceptible to," says Simon Pierce, principal scientist at the Marine Megafauna Foundation.

To collect data on the sharks, the WSORC project used Wave Glider SV3 drones, built by California-based Liquid Robotics. These can operate uninterrupted for up to 12 months at a time and use wave energy to propel themselves. A surface float, which houses solar panels, sensor equipment and transmitters, is attached to a finned sub-unit below the surface. The sub's fins pivot up and down as the waves lift the float and drive it forward at up to 3 knots (5.5 kilometres per hour).

The team set the drones to patrol 5 kilometres off Utila's north shore, where whale sharks are commonly seen. Each drone towed a receiver unit that can pick up signals from any shark with an acoustic tag.

Acoustic tags can be fitted to a whale shark's dorsal fin and release a sonic pulse every 60 seconds. These tags are cheaper than more sophisticated satellite tags and can better handle the pressure when whale sharks dive, says Madej.

Pierce says that there is still some way to go to live-monitor whale sharks - the longest continuous tracking in this project was 25 minutes - but he is "hugely interested" in the findings of these initial studies.

Read more: The world's biggest whopper

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Whale sharks' secrets revealed by live-tracking aquatic drones

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Wave-powered drones are being used to provide live tracking of the world's largest fish, the whale shark, for the first time. Researchers at the Whale Shark and Oceanic Research Center (WSORC) on the island of Utila, Honduras, have just finished a year-long project using autonomous "Wave Glider" drones to patrol for whale sharks and report back on their movements.