“Humans blow snot out at between three to eight miles per hour,” says Ocean Alliance CEO Iain Kerr. If the operator gets the positioning correct, collecting the snot is almost inevitable. As the aircraft approaches its target, the pilot switches on the drone’s camera, then uses it to position the snotbot about 15 feet above the blowhole. When whales surface, a researcher in a cheap, inflatable dingy sends the drone toward the animals. The snotbots can collect that many samples in an hour-and at a fraction of the cost. On a good day, the team might be able to biopsy five whales. Operating a fully equipped research vessel costs anywhere between $5,000 and $50,000 daily. First, the current process is absurdly expensive. The snotbots address two major challenges in whale research. So the marine research group Ocean Alliance is running a Kickstarter campaign (featuring actor Patrick Stewart) to custom-build a fleet of drones, or “snotbots,” that can hover above a surfacing whale, waiting for it to exhale. We can learn a lot from this snot, such as what stresses whales out, who’s related to whom, and what microorganism stowaways are catching rides within these marine mammals. Whale snot-technically “exhaled breath condensate”-contains DNA, hormones, and a complex ecosystem of viruses and bacteria. My second thought was, Did I just become patient zero in the whale flu pandemic? My third thought should have been, I’m covered in scientific gold!

My first thought was, Wow, I smell terrible.

Last year, Panigada spotted another fin whale with scoliosis near Barcelona, although its spinal deformity was less severe.A few years ago, a finback whale snotted all over me during a whale-watching trip off Santa Barbara, California.

In December 2022, a humpback whale called Moon was spotted in Hawaii with a broken back, after swimming more than 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) from British Columbia, Canada using only her flippers, according to The Guardian (opens in new tab). This is not the first case of whale scoliosis linked to vessel strikes. Related: Watch footage of 1,000 baleen whales in record-breaking feeding frenzy in Antarctica 'It is very unlikely it will survive.' Baleen whales can survive for many months without properly eating, which means that injuries like this can lead to a 'slow and painful death,' he added. 'We can see from the video that the whale is already very skinny and beginning to look unhealthy,' Currie said. But according to the footage, the injured whale is unable to do this, which means it is probably starving. To do this, they rely on their enormous tails, or flukes, to rapidly propel themselves through the water. But young whales that develop scoliosis almost never live to adulthood, Currie said.īaleen whales - a group that includes fin whales, blue whales ( Balaenoptera musculus), humpback whales ( Megaptera novaeangliae) and others - feed by lunging through large shoals of tiny crustaceans known as krill. It's possible for large whales to be born with scoliosis or develop it in their early years. But the experts also noted that it's hard to know exactly what happened. It's is likely that the whale 'was recently struck by a vessel,' Currie said, an opinion shared by Erich Hoyt (opens in new tab), a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) in the U.K., and Simone Panigada (opens in new tab), president of the Tethys Research Institute in Italy. 'The cause of scoliosis can take many forms, but the most common is blunt force trauma.' 'The term scoliosis simply refers to an abnormal lateral curvature of the spine,' Jens Currie (opens in new tab), chief scientist of the Pacific Whale Foundation in Hawaii, told Live Science in an email.

Finback whale