speaker-0: Earlier this year, a humpback whale, nicknamed Duchess of Anchovy, was seen swimming in the Monterey Bay, entangled in some fishing gear. So the Marine Mammal Center and other partners in the Monterey Bay area mobilized to free that whale from that rope. Gina Lennatti, who is the Cetacean Research Senior Manager at the Marine Mammal Center, was on that team. She was piloting a drone that helped the team see what was going on. And executes a flawless operation. Gina joins me on the program today to tell that story, to give us a State of the Union on Wales along the California coast, some of the threats, some of the opportunities, and we really geek out on drone technology and all that it has unlocked for the world of cetacean research. This is Science Solutions Santa Cruz. I'm Jonathan Hickon. Enjoy. Gina Lanati. Yes. Thanks for being here.
speaker-1: Thank you so much for inviting me. Very excited.
speaker-0: Today we're here to talk about whales and drones and all the cool
speaker-1: Thanks.
speaker-0: work that's happening at the Marine Mammal Center. Yes. Yes. So let's start with like with you. I want to talk about you a little bit. Can you remember the first time that you came up close with a cetacean? Yes.
speaker-1: Actually pretty vividly. so when I was five, I have family who lives in Southern California and we went to SeaWorld and we went to the Dolphin show and one came up very close to the glass. And there's actually a picture of me with my family like looking at the glass. And that connection, I was like, I want to do this. And, you know, as a five-year-old, you then wanna be a veterinarian, you wanna be president, you wanna be a singer and an author and all these things. But the Marine mammal interest went all like just continued all the way through. And no one ever said to stop following that passion. And yeah, my parents would take me to every aquarium, any city we'd visit, we'd seek out where the beach was, where the aquarium was. So had a lot of support and encouragement to pursue the field.
speaker-0: Do you remember the moment where you sort of like looked at the mirror and you were like, I'm doing it. Like I did it. I made it.
speaker-1: Yes, actually I did have a I wrote it in my journal. Yeah. It was so after I finished my master's in North Carolina, my first real world job was working for Florida Fish and Wildlife, down in St. Petersburg, Florida. And they had an open house day where w at the time I was working with manatees there. And people from the public could come in, ask questions and I we did a little demo of how to rescue a manatee with like a stuffed manatee. And someone young came up and asked me, like, like, how do I become a marine biologist like you? And I went, like me? I'm a marine biologist? yeah. Like that that was I remember them asking that and just being like, okay, I'm here. I'm here. And it it's been a long journey and a lot of work and but I have had a lot of help. too. So very grateful.
speaker-0: Mm, that's beautiful. You know, I think about all the kids that come through the Seymour Center, right?
speaker-1: Mm-hmm.
speaker-0: And the ones that go through the summer camp. And it's the it's those moments. You know, in fact, there was someone in a staff meeting recently who was sharing like their a moment that really like stood out to them was a little kid who walked away from the touch table and was like, I want to be a marine biologist someday, right? And I love to think, I love to think of that that little girl like being deciding and going for it in in very much the same way you did. Mm-hmm. So how did you make your way to the Marine Mammal Center? And tell us a little bit about the Marine Mammal Center. Sure.
speaker-1: So I'm originally from the East Coast, grew up in New Jersey. again, always loved going to the Jersey shore, exploring the oceans. I've like ping-ponged back and forth up at the East Coast. So went to undergrad in Maine, did my master's in North Carolina, worked in Florida, then did my PhD in New Brunswick, Canada. And at the time I was like, well, I it's time to. There's no more school left, even though I loved being a student and I was ready to like apply the skills that I'd learned. And I'm sure we can get into what I did during my PhD work, which was just I knew I loved marine mammals, but what I got to do with them during my research there just like gripped me. And I belong to an email distribution list called Mar Mam. And I highly recommend it to anyone starting out in the field or isn't who wants to try to find a job or some sort of connection or internship, but I found a posting there about the Marine Mammal Center having an opening. And I said, California is a nice place to live. Yep,
speaker-0: Sounds pretty good
speaker-1: yep. Beautiful weather. I had family in the state, so I applied. and here we are. Yeah. So I started back in April 2025.
speaker-0: Okay, all right. So I gotta go back to the to something that gripped you. What was it what was it about your PhD that gripped you? Yes.
speaker-1: Drones. I'm I'm like fully into this technology to study these animals. So back in 2017, I attended a marine mammal conference in Halifax, the Biennial Society for Marine Mammalogy conference. And at the time, 2017 was a very bad year for North Atlantic right whales, which is a species that lives along the eastern coast of the US and Canada. And there were 17 mortalities that year, no births. And I remember they were talking about these animals. And I was like, wow, I I know I want to go back to school. This seems like a calling. And then around the same time I met a person who became a big mentor of mine, Dr. Michael Moore at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And he shared with me that he was Flying drones over Wales in Cape Cod Bay with a thermal camera and like measuring the heat inside their blowholes. And I was just so amazed by that that that was even like a thing people were starting to explore. And I went to him and said, How do I do this? Can you can you teach me? Teach me. Yes. And he was very kind and was just like, Here's my data. And I was like, are you sure? And and we kind of looked at it together and wound up publishing some results from that. And that kind of catapulted me into my thes my PhD research, which was using thermal imagery from drones to measure the temperatures inside the blowholes of whales as a metric of health. And I still remember the first whale I flew the drone over. And it was a minky whale because we were kind of practicing and weren't too far offshore yet. And just seeing it in the remote controller first person view and just from then on being hooked. And I get this like rush every time I see an animal from the drone. It's such a cool perspective.
speaker-0: It you're looking down. So I'm a so tell so tell us what you're seeing. Yeah. Like what are you actually seeing and holding?
speaker-1: Right. So this is the remote controller. So there's a screen where you can see what the drone sees. So there's a camera that's gimbaled so it moves around on the drone, so you can direct it and point it different ways. And so our goal is to fly directly overhead the animal and look right down. And you can see a lot more of the animal than you can see from an oblique perspective on a boat. Oblique. Yes, meaning from the side or a lateral perspective. And What I love is that once you get over you never know what they're gonna show you. Like is it going to roll over and we'll be able to determine its sex or look or is it entangled and we'll see the entangling gear or or is it does it have a calf and you'd get to see the mother and the calf interacting? And I just I love seeing them swim and oftentimes when they exhale, if the light hits it right, it creates a rainbow. I call it a rain blow. so there's a lot of beauty to it in in addition to the scientific interest.
speaker-0: Would you be willing to share some footage that we can include in this in this episode? Yes.
speaker-1: I feel like that's that's the the hook is is the imagery is it's hard to describe.
speaker-0: Alright, hit it Edith. Let's get some footage going right now. I mean that that sounds incredible and today you're at the you're at the Marine Mammal Center, which is a really well known institution. I grew up in the East Bay for the most part. and so it's it was an organization I've been aware of essentially my whole life. Yes. So what is the Marine Mammal Center and why do you exist? Yeah.
speaker-1: So the Marine Mammal Center just celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. It is the largest marine mammal hospital in the world. So they up in Saussolito is the main facility, although they do have other locations in Monterey Bay, in Slow or San Luis Obispo, and in Hawaii. And at the main facility in Saussoled, they treat Mostly seals and sea lions, as well as sea otters. And every year they have hundreds of patients come in. there are 1,400 volunteers who go out and conduct rescues on these seals and sea lions, also known as pinnipeds, and bring them back to the facility where they're rehabilitated and with the end goal being release. But while they're in our care, there's an awesome opportunity to learn about why they were sick or injured or or orphaned. We can study their behaviors, their health, and that's an awesome opportunity also to educate people. So the center in Salito is open to the public and it's free for people to go observe and learn. And we also host a lot of veterinary students, externs, interns every year, and so it's a wonderful teaching hospital as well. And then where I come in is I'm part of the cetacean conservation biology team. Cetaceans meaning whales, dolphins, and porpoises. So I am surrounded by a lot of people who are doing the pinniped research and rescue and animal care. But my main goal is working with the cetaceans in our local water.
speaker-0: So there's this hotline that if if we see stranded pinniped, seal or sea lion, we call and then there's like a dispatch and is that so if if that sea lion or seal gets rescued, is it going to the marine mammal center? And like how do you how does how does that decision get made when we when someone from the public picks up and makes that call?
speaker-1: Right. And so first I'll share the hotline because I do want to share that with our audience. Please. So if you do see an animal you're concerned about on the beach, seal or sea lion, our hotline is four one five two eight nine seal or seven three two five.
speaker-0: Okay, great. We'll we'll present that on the screen here for everybody. Yeah. No, we'll also include it in the in the in the show notes. So yeah.
speaker-1: Excellent. Yes. So that's a great one to add to your phone and have on call. so yes, people call that. There's a dispatch. then we will kind of ask for photos, ask people to keep their distance. you don't want to approach a wild animal when it's especially if it's sick, and then determine what kind of response is necessary if it needs to come into our care. And the sites that are not the main facility will do kind of a triage and have some holding pens where they can treat the animals, give them fluids or medicine, and then they're usually transported in a like a ambulance basically up to our main facility where they'll receive longer term care until the veterinarians deem them fit enough to return to the wild. And then that's the happy moment where we r release them on the beach.
speaker-0: Well, thanks for sharing that because there is this hotline and it is I've called it before, and there is a little bit of like a it's a little bit of a black box, right? You're like you make the call, you they ask you a few questions, and then it's just kind of like, I don't know what happens next, right? So so thank you for for walking us through that. Though you are s studying whales and dolphins and porpoises. So why don't we start with just give you giving us like a state of the union of whales in this region, Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay. Where are we at? How's everybody doing?
speaker-1: Yeah, so I guess it depends on which whale you ask, how they're doing. We're in changing times. The oceans are changing, some for better, some for worse. And so a big purpose of our program is establishing baselines and doing long-term monitoring of whales so we can understand where they're moving to, how they're changing their behaviors, how their prey. Distribution may be changing and that might drive where we see them, when we see them. So right now we're doing work focused in San Francisco Bay area that includes the greater Farallon Islands. we also do some work in Monterey Bay. And there is there are a lot of humpback whales that come through and spend a lot of time in Monterey Bay. And we've been more recently seeing a lot more gray whales in our area actually coming. into the bay, so under the Golden Gate Bridge and spending some of them more than a hundred days in the bay.
speaker-0: I gr I mean, having grown up in the Bay Area, like that that to me is kind of mind blowing 'cause that was just that never happened. Right. You would hear I remember in the news, like once every five or ten years there would be a story of a gray whale that like made its way up to Sacramento or whatever. But like it was that was so rare. So that that is is that do you believe this is a change in their behavior?
speaker-1: Yes, so gray whales go through this boom and bust cycle that very much matches with Arctic productivity. So they feed up in the Arctic and they migrate down to Baja, Mexico area to give birth to calves. And as the ice retreats or you have a good or a bad year, you may have more or less calves and you might have more mortalities. And what we've been seeing Is much more widespread malnutrition of the whales and for longer periods of time. So there have in 1999 and 2000 there was what we call an unusual mortality event where an unexpected number of gray whales were found dead. And that kind of subsided. The population hit like a peak from what we understand around 2016. There were Written down between 25,000 and 30,000 individuals around that time. So we peaked around 2016. And we kind we know how many gray whales roughly based on shore-based surveys. So we count them, we being partners. Our group is just beginning to do some of this work as well. count them as they swim offshore because they they kind of come close to the coast. And so 2016 was a peak. And then around December 2018, we started seeing a lot more mortalities again. And all the way through November of 2023, we had another unusual mortality event. Again, malnutrition in a lot of the animals that washed ashore and a much reduced calving rate. And that was very concerning. And after the unusual mortality event, they got down to between Eleven thousand fourteen thousand individuals around Twenty Twenty Four.
speaker-0: That's I mean, that's a sixty six percent decline.
speaker-1: Quick math. Yes.
speaker-0: So I'm that that seems shockingly high.
speaker-1: It was very alarming, but we knew that these whales go through these periods and that they're resilient, but we really haven't seen them turn that corner much. And while last year's population estimate did increase, there's a lot of uncertainty around it because again, we think that some years the whales might migrate close enough for us to see them from shore, other years they might take a route that's farther offshore. And so Partners and our group are starting to think about how can we reach farther offshore to observe them and talking about drones, planes, acoustic sensors to listen for their calls, maybe even satellite imagery. So yes, that's why you have these broad range of numbers for the population.
speaker-0: So is it possible that we're just under counting because they're further offshore and we're just simply not seeing them? Correct. Okay. Yes. Let's talk about some of the other species that you're you're thinking about. So humpback whales or other cetacean species. Give us the sort of the state of the union on those. Sure.
speaker-1: So humpback whales in our area come from two distinct population segments. And these are groups that have unique migratory corridors. And we have humpback whales here from Central America and humpbacks from Mexico. And the humpback whales from Central America are still endangered while the ones from Mexico are threatened. And what we've been seeing more with the humpback whales is that They get entangled in fishing gear in our areas. And so we've been trying to liaise with the fishing industry. we do research so we understand where they are, when they're there, how long they spend time in the area, and give that information to the fishing industry to make changes and because fishers, fishers don't want to entangle whales. And But it's a very important industry to feed people. So we're trying to find ways to be sustainable while supporting fishing.
speaker-0: So that's the main threat, and I wanna spend a some some time on that. And how's the population of humpbacks doing just generally?
speaker-1: Right, so it there are fourteen across the globe, there are fourteen population segments. And each one's kinda doing different things. So since whaling in general humpbacks are doing better, but there are still certain populations that have not fully rebounded.
speaker-0: And our local the two sort of the two subsections I forget what you call them. Popul segments. those two, how are how what do we think about those particular segments and just their population that that we're seeing here in Monterey Bay and close to San Francisco?
speaker-1: Right, so yeah, the one is one is still endangered, the other's threatened, which is better than endangered, but still on the the list
speaker-0: Okay.
speaker-1: of animal safety to mitigate human activ.
speaker-0: And and is it human activity that is the biggest threat, these entanglements? Is there is there something g else going on with humpbacks that we should all be aware of?
speaker-1: Sure. I mean, with a changing climate, these animals, similar to the gray whales, might have a harder time finding food. And what we've been seeing are these habitat changes. Sometimes they compress. following anchovy, for example, in our area, they compress close to the coast where they are exposed to more human activity. And that can be, you know, you can be entangled and that can be both Sublethal or lethal, depending on how severe it is. There's vessel traffic and animals can get hit again, subletally or letally, but there's also noise, there's contaminants, so there's changing temperatures. So it's kind of this trifecta of of an a complex dynamic of of what these whales are experiencing.
speaker-0: We did have Jess Morton on from the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation who runs the Blue Whales Blue Skies program. So we got to learn a little bit about shipping, but we haven't had the chance to learn much about this habitat compression dynamic. So explain to me wh how that happens and why that happens.
speaker-1: Sure. So mostly the the physical properties of our water are changing. things are getting warmer, currents slow down, so there's less upwelling of nutrients. So the prey of humpback whales and other cetaceans has to move to find the right conditions. And so that often means compressing or condensing and sometimes close to the coast. And so Cetaceans are gonna follow their food, just like we follow, you know, the best restaurants. And so that's what's kind of the food is is contracting. So then the whales contract.
speaker-0: And is that is that correlated with with warm warm water events or or any other sort of like acute dynamic that we can kind of predict in a way?
speaker-1: Sure. So you might be familiar with the blob. That was a big environmental event, big warming event that resulted in a lot of change, a lot of mortality of animals, a lot changes in distribution. And we have a forecasted El Nino coming up. And so we are on high alert of what's going to happen with these animals. And we're starting to get prepared to respond to. Animals in weird places, exhibiting different behaviors, feeding maybe prey switching. so yeah, we're we're kinda all hands on deck, right?
speaker-0: And this is the value of some of these long term monitoring, right? If we kind of re rewind to twenty fifteen and the blob you referred to as this massive and intense marine heat wave that that caused some of that habitat compression, I'm assuming we learned a lot about what happened twelve years ago or ten eleven years ago. So when you think about the response now, right? We're we're anticipating in El Nino, the the water is warm, it's already warmer and we anticipate more. What are some of the the actions that the Marine Mammal Center can take or others can take to sort of like begin to prepare or mitigate? Like what are some specifics there?
speaker-1: Sure. So this is where that long-term baseline monitoring is really important so we can actually detect change. Cause there can be short bursts of change or this slow ramping of change. And so analyzing those data historically, understanding where we've seen hot spots of whales, and then continuing to survey in those areas and see if where did all the whales go? There are groups who are doing oceanographic sampling to understand, you know, is there more, less prey in this area than there was in previous years? we also look at the health of individual animals. So we look at w when they're alive, how fat or skinny they are. And we talked about drones earlier. That's a great perspective to see how wide or thin they are relative to their total length. But you can also do that from a boat and look at like they have a lot of fat kind of in their neck area. And that will it looks kind of like a peanut when they're not doing well. So tracking that as almost an early indicator of, wow, there are a lot of whales in poor condition. We better be prepared for more to strand or show up dead on our beaches. So I think the public can. can call us if they see whales that they're concerned about that information. We do have a web form, which I'm happy to share the the in the website for that people can fill out if they want to report an animal they're concerned about. Pictures are always great. But again, we tell people keep your distance and let these animals they are already experiencing lots of stress. So they don't need people coming close or boats closely approaching. So if you've got a good zoom lens, that can be really helpful.
speaker-0: So this is really an like an emergency response preparedness, right? I'm almost thinking about like a community being prepared for an earthquake or a fire or whatever, right? I think what I think what I'm hearing is this is like just readiness for emergency response. Right. Is that fair?
speaker-1: Yes. And we want to continue doing our like the baseline science again so we know what these long term trends are and we can detect when things return back to normal, hopefully. So
speaker-0: You know, if you haven't visited the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at UC Santa Cruz in a while, or ever, you really should come visit us. We are right on the bluffs of the beautiful Monterey Bay with an aquarium full of local species and a bunch of hands-on science exhibits that help you understand what's happening in our ocean and along our coast. We are connecting the incredible research happening at UC Santa Cruz with real-world solutions for our coastal community. We don't want science to just sit on a shelf. We want it to shape decisions, inspire kids, and help our community feel equipped to act. So if you care about the future of our ocean and our coastal community, or you just want to experience a place that makes you feel a little more connected to it, come visit us at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. Science Solutions Santa Cruz. There's also this, you know, this this this the entanglement concern. My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that because of that habitat compression, when the humpback whales are chasing their the anchovy close to shore, whatever their prey might be, that puts them into the same zones where crabbing is happening. And that as at least contributing to the uptick in in entanglements. Do I do I understand that correctly? And there's a s there's a solution underway, right, of this like this pop up crab gear. Where do you personally stand on pop up grab gear as a solution?
speaker-1: So personally, I am really excited about it. I think so. I'll explain the premise of it. The idea is that well, a lot of whales we believe they get entangled in vertical lines. So the line connecting a buoy at the surface to a trap at the bottom. And these lines are used to haul the gear up and collect the crab. And so these vertical lines, as whales are navigating through their habitat, If they're feeding, they might get them caught in their mouths. If they're swimming, they might get wrapped around the flipper or the tail. And the idea with pop-up, on demand, or ropeless, they're all kind of used synonymously, is that instead of having that vertical line in the water column when you're not actively hauling it out, is it's stored at the bottom with the trap. And then you can use, for example, an acoustic pinger. You stick it over the side of of the boat. And you have an app on your phone that you can send a ping and it releases that vertical line on the spot and you haul it in. And so that means less time that there is a vertical line in the water column. And what my work on the East Coast with North Atlantic right whales, we chartered fishing vessels for our research. And so I learned a lot from the fishers there about. How they're using and trialing this gear and actually starting to now use it to fill quotas for snow crab in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So there's a lot of promise there. It's not a one-size-fits-all model. And so there's still a lot of testing and development, but it shows some promise. And I think it would be not just great for whales, but all animals to eliminate that vertical line.
speaker-0: I imagine, you know, on a in a typical crabbing season, right, there could be hundreds of pots out, right? And so I I almost imagine like a whale needing to navigate through this like maze of of ropes. Mm-hmm. And to your point earlier, which is that, you know, fishers don't want to be entangling whales either, also 'cause that might mean that they're gonna lose their equipment. Exactly. Right. So there's so there's like We all have the same goal in mind in a way, right? Which is we don't want entanglements to happen. Right. And so I can envision a future in which, you know, the crab pot or the ropeless crab pot technology is financially sustainable for the fishers and still allows them to catch their yield and s you know, feed their families. And there's no ropes in the water. And so the whales are doing great. Like this seems like a a a a wonderful win win solution. Sure. If it works out the way that we all hope it would.
speaker-1: Yes, yes. It is like you I think you brought up the finances of it. These traps are very expensive right now as well. So that's another barrier to them being widely used. And in the current configuration of on-demand ropeless pop-up traps, you have what's like a trawl. So you have a few traps in a row that are connected by a ground line. That way the fishers pull up multiple traps at once. And so we also have to address are these ground lines, can we, can we just have one pot per per pop-up line, or do we need to have these ground lines? So there's still a lot of research and testing and funding that's necessary to test this all out.
speaker-0: So you've you've alluded a few times to how you're using drones to monitor populations, but let's geek out on drones.
speaker-1: Yes, I was waiting. Yes, yes, okay.
speaker-0: When are you gonna ask me about So yeah, so walk us through a typical day in the field, let's say.
speaker-1: Sure, sure. So I'll I'll use an example of a survey we would do out of in San Francisco Bay. So this past spring we were surveying for gray whales within the bay. So around Angel Island, Alcatraz Island, there were a bunch of gray whales there this year. We counted 17 individuals based on unique markings on each whale. So we have a rigid hull inflatable boat or a rib. It's about our boat operator's gonna get upset of me if I don't know this. But I think it's 24 feet long. And we take this out out of Saucelito and we get all our gear at the start of the day. We usually start as close to the first light as we can on knowing that I have to drive up from Santa Cruz. And but we bring aboard cameras, so with really high zoom lenses. We have our drone. We've been starting to do some environmental DNA sampling. Yes,
speaker-0: E DNA, yeah.
speaker-1: exactly, which I can get into if you'd like. We've also started to deploy some tags here with Ari Freedlanders group on whales too. So it depends on what our objectives are for the day. But we then kind of run these transect lines. we kind of take a specific route around the bay. When we see a blow, we go blow At eleven o'clock, which means not straight ahead, but just off to the side. And we'll go investigate. Again, trying to keep a few hundred meters distance. We take photographs. We have a software program on a a laptop or tablet where we record how many whales we see, what their behaviors are, if we see mud plumes coming out of their mouth, which means they might be feeding at the bottom. And and we track kind of their movements a little bit over time. Sometimes they do spirals or circles, which is just fun because you're just spinning in a circle in the boat. sometimes it's more linear. But if we if conditions are right, which means winds are low, there's no fog or precipitation, and the sea state is calm, we'll launch the drone, which is my favorite part. And when everyone and when anyone on the boat is like, Gina, do you think we should fly the drone? The answer is like almost always yes. Yes. Or I already have it ready to go. And so drones are not necessarily engineered to be launched from boats. And that is because you can imagine the boat doing this and a drone needing to kind of calibrate which way is up when it starts up. So we have What's called a hand launcher. And so my colleague Norelli, she's our most trained hand launcher. She will sit or stand at the bow of the boat, hold the drone, and usually like really loudly, ready to launch she goes, Ready launching, and we take off the boat, we go find the whale, which can sometimes be tricky. with when you're working on a screen this big and someone's like, It's right over there and you're like, No, it's not. But then there are two joysticks. You kinda can tr can control up, down, turning left, right, moving and forward back. and you fly it over to the whale. Again we get overhead, collect videos. again we can look at the behaviors. We can look at how fat or skinny it is We have a drone with a thermal camera. So I've been continuing to explore heat signatures from these whales. One of my big interests is whether we can detect sublethal trauma, for example, from a vessel strike, with the heat sensing camera. work.
speaker-0: How would that
speaker-1: So just like, you know, you sprain your ankle and you have to put a bag of ice on it and usually it's warm to the touch. There's a lot of blood flow to an injured area. So presumably if a whale is hit on its back, it comes to the water surface. You could see the heat signature at the surface.
speaker-0: Have you have you observed that yet?
speaker-1: We there was one case we had this spring, although it's whales also just dump a lot of heat. They have a lot of blubber, a lot of insulation, and they're, you know, swimming constantly. So I think they're just naturally, they overheat. So we're trying. One of my goals, research goals, is to differentiate what is a normal heat signature from a whale versus what's pathological, meaning it might be injured, sick. We also, I'm very curious if you can detect pregnancy, because there are changes in blood flow during a pregnancy, but that's still TBT.
speaker-0: I was just talking to Ari Friedlander in one of his his postdocs about like a whale pregnancy test. Yes. It requires extracting a little bit of their blubber to do that.
speaker-1: That is another way to do it, yes.
speaker-0: But you think there might be a chance you could do it with a drone based on heat signature.
speaker-1: Right, and then you don't even have to touch it. That's what I love about drone technology is it's all remote sensing, which means you don't have to manipulate or really disturb the animal. so that's one advantage of of the passive monitoring. How
speaker-0: Has drone technology transformed cetacean research?
speaker-1: Yes. Like night and day, I think. I mean, I around then I was just starting my career too and hadn't heard of a drone. But the technology has come so far since then. And it's much more reliable. It hovers very precisely. and the resolution of the cameras is so much better. And I love the kite idea because you don't have to run into battery limitations, which is a big issue still with drones, is usually our flights are fifteen to twenty minutes.
speaker-0: Yeah, it's pretty quick.
speaker-1: Yeah. Which, you know, as soon as I get the drone in the air, I could literally spend all day. And that's like when I see it ticking, the battery ticking down, it's like, no, I could just keep going. But yeah, so there have been there's been a an evolution of the technology since twenty thirteen. Or actually they started doing helicopter drones in twenty ten. And they were flying this helicopter drone with petri dishes through the exhaled breath of a whale. So you can it's basically like culturing the bacteria in your sneeze or
speaker-0: Like a swab like a mouth swab basically.
speaker-1: Get your microbiome or the the whale's microbiome. So they started testing that out in 2010. Then it grew like 2013-2014, John Durbin's group. they were flying these higher resolution cameras over whales and understanding that, yeah, we can measure in pixels or how f wide a whale is relative to its length. And there's a process called photogrammetry where you if you know the focal length of your camera and you know the distance from your target object which is the altitude of your drone you can scale how long a pixel is whether it's a centimeter or two centimeters and actually measure total lengths and now we're getting to body volumes we can estimate if a whale rolls on its side and you get a lateral photo and or video and then it's back straight and you see the top of it, you can three-dimensionally model the volume of a whale, which then people are taking that and saying, okay, if that's the volume, here's how much it weighs. Here's more information about its metabolic rate. Here's how much prey it has to ingest. And so every study that comes out, and man, there are so many, like the the rate of of surveys, the rate of studies using drones is like exponentially increasing. We're learning something new. And that's I mean, if I can continue to geek out, the they're also being used for the blow sampling that I mentioned, the X Held, they're being used to deploy suction cup tags.
speaker-0: so this is like this is like Ari Friedlander's group, right? They currently drive out on a boat and with a big stick they kind of like stick it to the back. Right. But you're you're saying that you could use a drone to do the same thing, just drop the
speaker-1: sticks to the back. Cool. And that's been pretty successful on a bunch of different species. people are using them to fly hydrophones, which are underwater microphones, and like dip them into the water near whales so we can listen while also observing their behaviors to see if they're they make certain certain vocalizations when they're behaving certain ways. and yeah, there's just there's so much more end I think the sky's the limit as with more uses for drones in the future.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's what's occurring to me now, right, is like historical cetacean research, at least like behavioral stuff is like you're in a boat, you're seeing it from the water level essentially. You got to keep your distance. There's only so much you can really see. I mean, when you're at the the water level. Right. and so by adding drones into the equation, it ba basically opens up a you know a hundred and eighty degree like possibility for observation. in a way that like I now it makes sense to me why all these studies are emerging if tr drones have made it, because now we have a whole new set of lenses to look at these animals.
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: Not to mention dipping hydrophones in and sticking tags on and all this stuff. And I know the whale lover listeners here are probably also stoked that it doesn't require really any human contact with the animal either. Right. It allows us to keep it keep our distance.
speaker-1: We still so I will say all our drone work over whales is done under under permit. so all research on whales with drones has to be NOAA permit approved. And we do have minimum flight altitudes. So for our group it's twelve meters, but for groups doing the blow sampling, it's it has to be lower. and there is still a an acoustic or noise stimulus from a drone. And so we monitor whales' behaviors for and during a flight and look for any changes that might be elicited by the drone. Occasionally I have seen anecdotally a whale turn and kind of look.
speaker-0: Look at
speaker-1: Yeah, I had a hunt back whale do that once. Fascinating. sometimes it's hard to attribute a behavioral response to the drone versus another whale nearby, but it is something I personally keep in mind that colleagues of mine keep in mind is there is still a noise. There's also a shadow And, you know, we have to be aware that if we start flying a drone over whale every single day, we don't know if, you know, it's cha if their heart rate elevates when the drone's overhead or there's some physiological response to a drone. So I do think while it's much less disruptive than a close vessel approach or, you know, catching a small cetacean like a dolphin or a porpoise and getting your hands on it, much less stressful than that. There's still that concern that we should continue to check in and reflect on what impact we're having on on these animals.
speaker-0: Are you aware of any studies about the impacts of drones?
speaker-1: Yes, people have looked at like the noise envelopes at different depths in the water and found they're pretty minimal. I don't know, I I like to think of it as like a fly in your ear, probably. A lot of times it's probably below the threshold of what these animals can hear. But it is still like, you know, if you're doing your work at your desk and you've got a fly in your ear the whole day. Yeah. That's still kind of annoying. So again, it's something it's an improvement for sure. But something as a scientist I still reflect on and see if we can continue to minimize our impacts on the animal.
speaker-0: You used drone technology in Monterey Bay, I think earlier this summer for a whale known as Duchess of Anchovy. Yes. So so what was your role? What what happened to Duchess of Anchovy and what was your role in in that particular project?
speaker-1: Right. So the Duchess of Anchovy, a humpback whale, was reported to let me back up a little bit. The Marine Mammal Center is part of the California or is part of the West Coast Large Whale Entanglement Response Network. That's a lot of lot of words. But it's a group that includes other partners in the area of trained entanglement responders. So when a whale is reported. Entangled, these people are trained to approach and try to remove the gear. It is a very high stakes, dangerous, requires a lot of training kind of situation. So again, lots we do lots of training with pretend whales and off of our boats to to prepare for the actual thing. And so Duchess of Anchovy was reported by local whale watch operators in Monterey Bay as being entangled. I think the first report was back in May of this year. folks went out, couldn't find the whale, which in is usually the case for a lot of these reports. the the teams in Monterey Bay have really minimized the amount of response time. To get out there on the water. It's amazing how quickly within an an hour, sometimes thirty minutes, they can be on the water. But whales swim fast, weather conditions change, and a lot of times these animals can't be relocated. And then this in May, couldn't find it. So we hoped for the best. But then back in July, early July, it was reported again.
speaker-0: And to be clear, this this this was reported as being entangled, dragging dragging some equipment alongside of her, right? This is what people were seeing.
speaker-1: Yes, yes. And got photographs to confirm that, which is really helpful in these cases. so we got reports again, the entanglement response network assembled a response. what was great was that again, whale watch operators in the area were able to like hand off the whale kind of where one tour says, I gotta go, but another one comes in and stays with it. That that is really helpful for us to relocate an animal. Again,
speaker-0: Keep eyes on.
speaker-1: keeping a safe distance, but keeping track of its movements. And at the time we noticed its body condition had kind of decreased. It was looking skinnier, had some like paris like parasites on it. So we were like, this this gear needs to come off if we can. And we went out that day. So this was Marine Life Studies, the Marine Mammal Center, folks from NOAA and Moss Landing Marine Labs were involved in the response. And we were able to put a telemetry tag on the whale. So this is basically a satellite pinger. It's attached to a buoy with an antenna that pings a satellite when it's at the surface. And it's attached to a line that is has a grappling hook at the end. So a very trained Responder through the grappling hook into the trailing gear off the whale and that way it gets wrapped up in there and we could track the whale's movements in case, you know, we lost sight of it, we can track the satellite pings.
speaker-0: And the trade-off there is like okay, I'm adding something for that whale something a little more for that whale to drag, but the benefit is well we know we're gonna be able to find it.
speaker-1: Right. And sometimes attaching or that extra drag does pull the gear free, depending on the configuration of the gear. So sometimes that's all it takes and then that's a happy out outcome. in this case, the whale it was the weather picked up that day, but we got the int the the telemetry tag on and just before the winds kinda picked up, we flew the drone. So I was able to obtain imagery showing that that grappling hook was nice and solidly in there. And we were able to kind of visualize how the line was wrapped around the tail. And we then when increased C state got rougher, we came back to the lab. We looked at that imagery. We decided how we were gonna cut the gear to have the best possible outcome of of freeing the animal. Cause it's usually asymmetrical. You have gear coming off one side, you wanna know how many wraps you have around, you wanna know. If there's line around the flippers or through the mouth. In this case, it was just around the tail. So we kind of had a game plan and we now had the satellite pinging. So the next day we went out again, located the animal very quickly, again, thanks to the telemetry tag, flew the drone again to confirm that the configuration hadn't changed overnight. Then I continued to fly the drone while our highly trained responders launch a separate smaller boat. They used the line from the telemetry tag to pull up to the whale.
speaker-0: And kinda they drag themselves to the whale in in a sense.
speaker-1: And this whale, I'd say its behavior was almost ideal for response. It kind of stayed at the surface, relatively slow swim. And so a lot of times, if you're yanking on gear that's embedded in a whale's skin, they're not happy about it. And they're not gonna, you know, dive or breach or yes. So this is this was an ideal case. So they pulled up to the animal. And you know, I was able continuing to fly and we try to in real time radio to the team like, the whale's coming to the surface in three, two, one, or looks like one line was removed, but there's still a line over here or still a wrap on this side. And so trying to relay that information and you know, took a couple hours of of you know, backing off the whale, letting it settle. Coming back making a cut. And we there was still they had made a few cuts. We couldn't really tell from above where the line was still anchored on the whale. And so again, the winds were picking up. We were like, well, I guess we'll have to try again tomorrow. And as they were backing off, it must have been the angle that they kind of had on the line still on the whale. They said they heard a like and everything released. And the whale took off. It did not thank us. It was like, peace, I'm out. and we were able to collect all the gear, which can be used for gear identification. We can learn where in the water column that whale might have gotten entangled. yes. So that's very useful information. I'm happy to share that. Duchess of Anchovy was seen days later by the Whale Watch operators and gear free. So that was nice to confirm. So yes, that was a happy, very happy outcome and a good good boost.
speaker-0: Well, thank you for that. I mean, on behalf of all of us that love these animals, like thank you. What a what a wonderful end to that story. It occurs to me that the drones enabled sort of two really important pieces of that operation. Right. One was the initial survey that allowed you to come up with a game plan, right? That mission mission briefing, so to speak, right? Yes. Which because I imagine without that, you know, the the rescue teams go out and they it's probably really intense. It's probably like emotionally hard, like You know, the boat's shaken, you know, the the whale is reacting. There's probably a lot going on. Yes. And if you're having to figure out what to do among all that, right, that sounds really challenging. So to be able to come up with the plan ahead of time, probably makes for the operation to go a lot more smoothly. And then the second thing was like during the actual mission, like to have eyes on the whale as the little boat was going up there to sort sort of like actually do the cutting. Right. Where you could warn them, you could give them information real time. Like that what a cool like capability that didn't exist a few years ago.
speaker-1: Right. And I'm this is one of the first few cases I've I've been now on three four entanglement responses where I've flown the drone and I learn something every time about what kind of information is helpful to relay, when it's good to fly, when it's not, when it's more of a distraction maybe to the actual operations. and so it's yeah, it's again, I continue to have these unintended outcomes of drone use that I never envisioned my path taking. so that's really cool. It's also this footage is great for training opportunities. So we can say, you know, well maybe next time we would have done this or this was a great cut here. That was just how you want to do it on future cases. So that is again more data for for more successful outcomes in the future.
speaker-0: The whale took off as soon as the gear was released. And it and I have to ask, you know, there's some anthropomorphizing here. But to what d degree do you think that there is like a sense of, you know, relief or a sense of like understanding that, you know, these humans are are are helping, right? I mean, is there I know that this is very like this is very like almost like a spiritual question, but like what's your personal feeling on?
speaker-1: I get the question a lot and it's something I haven't really I've never witnessed a whale thank us or, you know, come back and, you know, wave or sometimes the whale will breach after it's free. And while that's beautiful, it's like, is that also a pain response? I think there's a lot we still don't know. But I've had encounters with whales where they approach a boat and they turn and look. you in the eye and you know there's something there that are like actually recognizing you as something also intelligent. Yes.
speaker-0: Yes.
speaker-1: So I've had those moments, not during disentanglement response, that are really beautiful.
speaker-0: Gina, before we go, is there anything else that you wanna hit?
speaker-1: Well, I do want to also share the entangled whale hotline in case you're out and see an entangled whale. So again, get out your phones. Eight seven seven seven six seven nine four two five. Thank you. SOS whale. So remember.
speaker-0: SOS Well, perfect. Thank you.
speaker-1: the other thing, so reporting cases when you see them. I I also want to empower our listeners to be community scientists. The local knowledge you have on these animals is super valuable to these this long-term monitoring. And if you think you see something in a weird place, an animal where you have never seen it before, again, photographing these things and and sharing them with our group is is really helpful. And in addition to all the things you're probably doing day-to-day to help the environment. So shopping local, and you know, understanding where your food is coming from and, you know, biking, walking to work. So all those things help whales. So I'm I'm constantly thinking about whales. Now you can too when you turn the lights off when you're not in a room, etcetera.
speaker-0: Thank you, Gina. Yeah, yeah. We collect questions in our exhibit hall here for our podcast guests. And so we got we got a bunch for you. but I'm gonna just gonna read two of them for you today.
speaker-1: Like my thesis defense all over again.
speaker-0: Except from eight year olds. So it's gonna be even All right. So we got a question here that said, what is the success rate of unentanglements? So once you get them free, how likely will they survive if injured?
speaker-1: That's a tough one to answer. Again, especially with humpback whales, there are many whales. So we it's hard to track them all after they might be disentangled. I should mention that as a community scientist, if you get a photo of the underside of a humpback whale tail, you can send that to Happy Whale, which is a free open website where they use an AI algorithm to match the patterns on the underside of the tail to a catalog. And you can then sign up for alerts to track that whale over time. And we as scientists use that. So if we know the identity of a whale that we disentangled and then someone in Mexico happens to take a photo of that whale, we get alerted and go, awesome, it survived and made it back down to Mexico. So in terms of determining success rate. I'll just share from my personal experience. So I started about a year and a half ago. I've been out on four entanglement responses. two of those were we actually removed gear. One, the whale wound up shedding the gear on its own. The fourth, not sure what happened to it. And but that is excludes all the animals we get reported and then can't relocate, which we get about 12 reports a year, give or take, and it varies seasonally. So hard to give a precise answer to that. But the other thing to keep in mind is that entanglement, even if the whale is freed, is super energetically demanding. It can deplete body condition. It might affect whether a female has a calf that year or not. So there are chronic consequences of being entangled, even though we free them. So I think of entanglement response as a band-aid solution. Ideally, we'll be put out of that job if we're able to mitigate whales getting entangled in the first place.
speaker-0: All right, Gina, one more for you, and this comes from Sienna C. Thank you, Sienna for asking this question. Have you untangled any baby whales or other sea creatures?
speaker-1: Yes. So last year we had a mother check with her calf, which we nicknamed Chex Mix or Yes. that the Chexmix was entangled. And this was a complicated entanglement because there wasn't really trailing line. It was through the mouth and around the flippers. And we spent a lot of days trying to approach the calf. in a way to make a cut and got a lot of drone footage again, but the mother would kind of come between us and the and the calf. And so it was very difficult. And we wound up not actually getting to make a cut. But that is the one case where months later, again a whale watch operator reported, I think this is Chex Mix. We went out, flew the drone, confirmed whale was no longer entangled. Right. So Chex Mix was yes, a calf with its mother and is now swimming free also.
speaker-0: that's wonderful, wonderful way to end this episode. Yeah. Well Gina, thank you for everything that you do. Yes. Thank you for being here today. I've had so much fun in this conversation. I hope to see you again soon.
speaker-1: Yeah, really appreciate it. Thanks for the questions and for bringing more attention to the whales.
speaker-0: Alright, that does it for the pod. Thank you, Gina, for coming on the program today. And thanks to everybody at the Marine Mammal Center, staff and volunteers alike for everything that you're doing for marine mammals along the California coast. Thanks to Edith Belmont for editing. Thanks to Valerie C2 and Libby Palkovax for production. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
speaker-1: Thank you so much for inviting me. Very excited.
speaker-0: Today we're here to talk about whales and drones and all the cool
speaker-1: Thanks.
speaker-0: work that's happening at the Marine Mammal Center. Yes. Yes. So let's start with like with you. I want to talk about you a little bit. Can you remember the first time that you came up close with a cetacean? Yes.
speaker-1: Actually pretty vividly. so when I was five, I have family who lives in Southern California and we went to SeaWorld and we went to the Dolphin show and one came up very close to the glass. And there's actually a picture of me with my family like looking at the glass. And that connection, I was like, I want to do this. And, you know, as a five-year-old, you then wanna be a veterinarian, you wanna be president, you wanna be a singer and an author and all these things. But the Marine mammal interest went all like just continued all the way through. And no one ever said to stop following that passion. And yeah, my parents would take me to every aquarium, any city we'd visit, we'd seek out where the beach was, where the aquarium was. So had a lot of support and encouragement to pursue the field.
speaker-0: Do you remember the moment where you sort of like looked at the mirror and you were like, I'm doing it. Like I did it. I made it.
speaker-1: Yes, actually I did have a I wrote it in my journal. Yeah. It was so after I finished my master's in North Carolina, my first real world job was working for Florida Fish and Wildlife, down in St. Petersburg, Florida. And they had an open house day where w at the time I was working with manatees there. And people from the public could come in, ask questions and I we did a little demo of how to rescue a manatee with like a stuffed manatee. And someone young came up and asked me, like, like, how do I become a marine biologist like you? And I went, like me? I'm a marine biologist? yeah. Like that that was I remember them asking that and just being like, okay, I'm here. I'm here. And it it's been a long journey and a lot of work and but I have had a lot of help. too. So very grateful.
speaker-0: Mm, that's beautiful. You know, I think about all the kids that come through the Seymour Center, right?
speaker-1: Mm-hmm.
speaker-0: And the ones that go through the summer camp. And it's the it's those moments. You know, in fact, there was someone in a staff meeting recently who was sharing like their a moment that really like stood out to them was a little kid who walked away from the touch table and was like, I want to be a marine biologist someday, right? And I love to think, I love to think of that that little girl like being deciding and going for it in in very much the same way you did. Mm-hmm. So how did you make your way to the Marine Mammal Center? And tell us a little bit about the Marine Mammal Center. Sure.
speaker-1: So I'm originally from the East Coast, grew up in New Jersey. again, always loved going to the Jersey shore, exploring the oceans. I've like ping-ponged back and forth up at the East Coast. So went to undergrad in Maine, did my master's in North Carolina, worked in Florida, then did my PhD in New Brunswick, Canada. And at the time I was like, well, I it's time to. There's no more school left, even though I loved being a student and I was ready to like apply the skills that I'd learned. And I'm sure we can get into what I did during my PhD work, which was just I knew I loved marine mammals, but what I got to do with them during my research there just like gripped me. And I belong to an email distribution list called Mar Mam. And I highly recommend it to anyone starting out in the field or isn't who wants to try to find a job or some sort of connection or internship, but I found a posting there about the Marine Mammal Center having an opening. And I said, California is a nice place to live. Yep,
speaker-0: Sounds pretty good
speaker-1: yep. Beautiful weather. I had family in the state, so I applied. and here we are. Yeah. So I started back in April 2025.
speaker-0: Okay, all right. So I gotta go back to the to something that gripped you. What was it what was it about your PhD that gripped you? Yes.
speaker-1: Drones. I'm I'm like fully into this technology to study these animals. So back in 2017, I attended a marine mammal conference in Halifax, the Biennial Society for Marine Mammalogy conference. And at the time, 2017 was a very bad year for North Atlantic right whales, which is a species that lives along the eastern coast of the US and Canada. And there were 17 mortalities that year, no births. And I remember they were talking about these animals. And I was like, wow, I I know I want to go back to school. This seems like a calling. And then around the same time I met a person who became a big mentor of mine, Dr. Michael Moore at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And he shared with me that he was Flying drones over Wales in Cape Cod Bay with a thermal camera and like measuring the heat inside their blowholes. And I was just so amazed by that that that was even like a thing people were starting to explore. And I went to him and said, How do I do this? Can you can you teach me? Teach me. Yes. And he was very kind and was just like, Here's my data. And I was like, are you sure? And and we kind of looked at it together and wound up publishing some results from that. And that kind of catapulted me into my thes my PhD research, which was using thermal imagery from drones to measure the temperatures inside the blowholes of whales as a metric of health. And I still remember the first whale I flew the drone over. And it was a minky whale because we were kind of practicing and weren't too far offshore yet. And just seeing it in the remote controller first person view and just from then on being hooked. And I get this like rush every time I see an animal from the drone. It's such a cool perspective.
speaker-0: It you're looking down. So I'm a so tell so tell us what you're seeing. Yeah. Like what are you actually seeing and holding?
speaker-1: Right. So this is the remote controller. So there's a screen where you can see what the drone sees. So there's a camera that's gimbaled so it moves around on the drone, so you can direct it and point it different ways. And so our goal is to fly directly overhead the animal and look right down. And you can see a lot more of the animal than you can see from an oblique perspective on a boat. Oblique. Yes, meaning from the side or a lateral perspective. And What I love is that once you get over you never know what they're gonna show you. Like is it going to roll over and we'll be able to determine its sex or look or is it entangled and we'll see the entangling gear or or is it does it have a calf and you'd get to see the mother and the calf interacting? And I just I love seeing them swim and oftentimes when they exhale, if the light hits it right, it creates a rainbow. I call it a rain blow. so there's a lot of beauty to it in in addition to the scientific interest.
speaker-0: Would you be willing to share some footage that we can include in this in this episode? Yes.
speaker-1: I feel like that's that's the the hook is is the imagery is it's hard to describe.
speaker-0: Alright, hit it Edith. Let's get some footage going right now. I mean that that sounds incredible and today you're at the you're at the Marine Mammal Center, which is a really well known institution. I grew up in the East Bay for the most part. and so it's it was an organization I've been aware of essentially my whole life. Yes. So what is the Marine Mammal Center and why do you exist? Yeah.
speaker-1: So the Marine Mammal Center just celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. It is the largest marine mammal hospital in the world. So they up in Saussolito is the main facility, although they do have other locations in Monterey Bay, in Slow or San Luis Obispo, and in Hawaii. And at the main facility in Saussoled, they treat Mostly seals and sea lions, as well as sea otters. And every year they have hundreds of patients come in. there are 1,400 volunteers who go out and conduct rescues on these seals and sea lions, also known as pinnipeds, and bring them back to the facility where they're rehabilitated and with the end goal being release. But while they're in our care, there's an awesome opportunity to learn about why they were sick or injured or or orphaned. We can study their behaviors, their health, and that's an awesome opportunity also to educate people. So the center in Salito is open to the public and it's free for people to go observe and learn. And we also host a lot of veterinary students, externs, interns every year, and so it's a wonderful teaching hospital as well. And then where I come in is I'm part of the cetacean conservation biology team. Cetaceans meaning whales, dolphins, and porpoises. So I am surrounded by a lot of people who are doing the pinniped research and rescue and animal care. But my main goal is working with the cetaceans in our local water.
speaker-0: So there's this hotline that if if we see stranded pinniped, seal or sea lion, we call and then there's like a dispatch and is that so if if that sea lion or seal gets rescued, is it going to the marine mammal center? And like how do you how does how does that decision get made when we when someone from the public picks up and makes that call?
speaker-1: Right. And so first I'll share the hotline because I do want to share that with our audience. Please. So if you do see an animal you're concerned about on the beach, seal or sea lion, our hotline is four one five two eight nine seal or seven three two five.
speaker-0: Okay, great. We'll we'll present that on the screen here for everybody. Yeah. No, we'll also include it in the in the in the show notes. So yeah.
speaker-1: Excellent. Yes. So that's a great one to add to your phone and have on call. so yes, people call that. There's a dispatch. then we will kind of ask for photos, ask people to keep their distance. you don't want to approach a wild animal when it's especially if it's sick, and then determine what kind of response is necessary if it needs to come into our care. And the sites that are not the main facility will do kind of a triage and have some holding pens where they can treat the animals, give them fluids or medicine, and then they're usually transported in a like a ambulance basically up to our main facility where they'll receive longer term care until the veterinarians deem them fit enough to return to the wild. And then that's the happy moment where we r release them on the beach.
speaker-0: Well, thanks for sharing that because there is this hotline and it is I've called it before, and there is a little bit of like a it's a little bit of a black box, right? You're like you make the call, you they ask you a few questions, and then it's just kind of like, I don't know what happens next, right? So so thank you for for walking us through that. Though you are s studying whales and dolphins and porpoises. So why don't we start with just give you giving us like a state of the union of whales in this region, Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay. Where are we at? How's everybody doing?
speaker-1: Yeah, so I guess it depends on which whale you ask, how they're doing. We're in changing times. The oceans are changing, some for better, some for worse. And so a big purpose of our program is establishing baselines and doing long-term monitoring of whales so we can understand where they're moving to, how they're changing their behaviors, how their prey. Distribution may be changing and that might drive where we see them, when we see them. So right now we're doing work focused in San Francisco Bay area that includes the greater Farallon Islands. we also do some work in Monterey Bay. And there is there are a lot of humpback whales that come through and spend a lot of time in Monterey Bay. And we've been more recently seeing a lot more gray whales in our area actually coming. into the bay, so under the Golden Gate Bridge and spending some of them more than a hundred days in the bay.
speaker-0: I gr I mean, having grown up in the Bay Area, like that that to me is kind of mind blowing 'cause that was just that never happened. Right. You would hear I remember in the news, like once every five or ten years there would be a story of a gray whale that like made its way up to Sacramento or whatever. But like it was that was so rare. So that that is is that do you believe this is a change in their behavior?
speaker-1: Yes, so gray whales go through this boom and bust cycle that very much matches with Arctic productivity. So they feed up in the Arctic and they migrate down to Baja, Mexico area to give birth to calves. And as the ice retreats or you have a good or a bad year, you may have more or less calves and you might have more mortalities. And what we've been seeing Is much more widespread malnutrition of the whales and for longer periods of time. So there have in 1999 and 2000 there was what we call an unusual mortality event where an unexpected number of gray whales were found dead. And that kind of subsided. The population hit like a peak from what we understand around 2016. There were Written down between 25,000 and 30,000 individuals around that time. So we peaked around 2016. And we kind we know how many gray whales roughly based on shore-based surveys. So we count them, we being partners. Our group is just beginning to do some of this work as well. count them as they swim offshore because they they kind of come close to the coast. And so 2016 was a peak. And then around December 2018, we started seeing a lot more mortalities again. And all the way through November of 2023, we had another unusual mortality event. Again, malnutrition in a lot of the animals that washed ashore and a much reduced calving rate. And that was very concerning. And after the unusual mortality event, they got down to between Eleven thousand fourteen thousand individuals around Twenty Twenty Four.
speaker-0: That's I mean, that's a sixty six percent decline.
speaker-1: Quick math. Yes.
speaker-0: So I'm that that seems shockingly high.
speaker-1: It was very alarming, but we knew that these whales go through these periods and that they're resilient, but we really haven't seen them turn that corner much. And while last year's population estimate did increase, there's a lot of uncertainty around it because again, we think that some years the whales might migrate close enough for us to see them from shore, other years they might take a route that's farther offshore. And so Partners and our group are starting to think about how can we reach farther offshore to observe them and talking about drones, planes, acoustic sensors to listen for their calls, maybe even satellite imagery. So yes, that's why you have these broad range of numbers for the population.
speaker-0: So is it possible that we're just under counting because they're further offshore and we're just simply not seeing them? Correct. Okay. Yes. Let's talk about some of the other species that you're you're thinking about. So humpback whales or other cetacean species. Give us the sort of the state of the union on those. Sure.
speaker-1: So humpback whales in our area come from two distinct population segments. And these are groups that have unique migratory corridors. And we have humpback whales here from Central America and humpbacks from Mexico. And the humpback whales from Central America are still endangered while the ones from Mexico are threatened. And what we've been seeing more with the humpback whales is that They get entangled in fishing gear in our areas. And so we've been trying to liaise with the fishing industry. we do research so we understand where they are, when they're there, how long they spend time in the area, and give that information to the fishing industry to make changes and because fishers, fishers don't want to entangle whales. And But it's a very important industry to feed people. So we're trying to find ways to be sustainable while supporting fishing.
speaker-0: So that's the main threat, and I wanna spend a some some time on that. And how's the population of humpbacks doing just generally?
speaker-1: Right, so it there are fourteen across the globe, there are fourteen population segments. And each one's kinda doing different things. So since whaling in general humpbacks are doing better, but there are still certain populations that have not fully rebounded.
speaker-0: And our local the two sort of the two subsections I forget what you call them. Popul segments. those two, how are how what do we think about those particular segments and just their population that that we're seeing here in Monterey Bay and close to San Francisco?
speaker-1: Right, so yeah, the one is one is still endangered, the other's threatened, which is better than endangered, but still on the the list
speaker-0: Okay.
speaker-1: of animal safety to mitigate human activ.
speaker-0: And and is it human activity that is the biggest threat, these entanglements? Is there is there something g else going on with humpbacks that we should all be aware of?
speaker-1: Sure. I mean, with a changing climate, these animals, similar to the gray whales, might have a harder time finding food. And what we've been seeing are these habitat changes. Sometimes they compress. following anchovy, for example, in our area, they compress close to the coast where they are exposed to more human activity. And that can be, you know, you can be entangled and that can be both Sublethal or lethal, depending on how severe it is. There's vessel traffic and animals can get hit again, subletally or letally, but there's also noise, there's contaminants, so there's changing temperatures. So it's kind of this trifecta of of an a complex dynamic of of what these whales are experiencing.
speaker-0: We did have Jess Morton on from the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation who runs the Blue Whales Blue Skies program. So we got to learn a little bit about shipping, but we haven't had the chance to learn much about this habitat compression dynamic. So explain to me wh how that happens and why that happens.
speaker-1: Sure. So mostly the the physical properties of our water are changing. things are getting warmer, currents slow down, so there's less upwelling of nutrients. So the prey of humpback whales and other cetaceans has to move to find the right conditions. And so that often means compressing or condensing and sometimes close to the coast. And so Cetaceans are gonna follow their food, just like we follow, you know, the best restaurants. And so that's what's kind of the food is is contracting. So then the whales contract.
speaker-0: And is that is that correlated with with warm warm water events or or any other sort of like acute dynamic that we can kind of predict in a way?
speaker-1: Sure. So you might be familiar with the blob. That was a big environmental event, big warming event that resulted in a lot of change, a lot of mortality of animals, a lot changes in distribution. And we have a forecasted El Nino coming up. And so we are on high alert of what's going to happen with these animals. And we're starting to get prepared to respond to. Animals in weird places, exhibiting different behaviors, feeding maybe prey switching. so yeah, we're we're kinda all hands on deck, right?
speaker-0: And this is the value of some of these long term monitoring, right? If we kind of re rewind to twenty fifteen and the blob you referred to as this massive and intense marine heat wave that that caused some of that habitat compression, I'm assuming we learned a lot about what happened twelve years ago or ten eleven years ago. So when you think about the response now, right? We're we're anticipating in El Nino, the the water is warm, it's already warmer and we anticipate more. What are some of the the actions that the Marine Mammal Center can take or others can take to sort of like begin to prepare or mitigate? Like what are some specifics there?
speaker-1: Sure. So this is where that long-term baseline monitoring is really important so we can actually detect change. Cause there can be short bursts of change or this slow ramping of change. And so analyzing those data historically, understanding where we've seen hot spots of whales, and then continuing to survey in those areas and see if where did all the whales go? There are groups who are doing oceanographic sampling to understand, you know, is there more, less prey in this area than there was in previous years? we also look at the health of individual animals. So we look at w when they're alive, how fat or skinny they are. And we talked about drones earlier. That's a great perspective to see how wide or thin they are relative to their total length. But you can also do that from a boat and look at like they have a lot of fat kind of in their neck area. And that will it looks kind of like a peanut when they're not doing well. So tracking that as almost an early indicator of, wow, there are a lot of whales in poor condition. We better be prepared for more to strand or show up dead on our beaches. So I think the public can. can call us if they see whales that they're concerned about that information. We do have a web form, which I'm happy to share the the in the website for that people can fill out if they want to report an animal they're concerned about. Pictures are always great. But again, we tell people keep your distance and let these animals they are already experiencing lots of stress. So they don't need people coming close or boats closely approaching. So if you've got a good zoom lens, that can be really helpful.
speaker-0: So this is really an like an emergency response preparedness, right? I'm almost thinking about like a community being prepared for an earthquake or a fire or whatever, right? I think what I think what I'm hearing is this is like just readiness for emergency response. Right. Is that fair?
speaker-1: Yes. And we want to continue doing our like the baseline science again so we know what these long term trends are and we can detect when things return back to normal, hopefully. So
speaker-0: You know, if you haven't visited the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at UC Santa Cruz in a while, or ever, you really should come visit us. We are right on the bluffs of the beautiful Monterey Bay with an aquarium full of local species and a bunch of hands-on science exhibits that help you understand what's happening in our ocean and along our coast. We are connecting the incredible research happening at UC Santa Cruz with real-world solutions for our coastal community. We don't want science to just sit on a shelf. We want it to shape decisions, inspire kids, and help our community feel equipped to act. So if you care about the future of our ocean and our coastal community, or you just want to experience a place that makes you feel a little more connected to it, come visit us at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. Science Solutions Santa Cruz. There's also this, you know, this this this the entanglement concern. My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that because of that habitat compression, when the humpback whales are chasing their the anchovy close to shore, whatever their prey might be, that puts them into the same zones where crabbing is happening. And that as at least contributing to the uptick in in entanglements. Do I do I understand that correctly? And there's a s there's a solution underway, right, of this like this pop up crab gear. Where do you personally stand on pop up grab gear as a solution?
speaker-1: So personally, I am really excited about it. I think so. I'll explain the premise of it. The idea is that well, a lot of whales we believe they get entangled in vertical lines. So the line connecting a buoy at the surface to a trap at the bottom. And these lines are used to haul the gear up and collect the crab. And so these vertical lines, as whales are navigating through their habitat, If they're feeding, they might get them caught in their mouths. If they're swimming, they might get wrapped around the flipper or the tail. And the idea with pop-up, on demand, or ropeless, they're all kind of used synonymously, is that instead of having that vertical line in the water column when you're not actively hauling it out, is it's stored at the bottom with the trap. And then you can use, for example, an acoustic pinger. You stick it over the side of of the boat. And you have an app on your phone that you can send a ping and it releases that vertical line on the spot and you haul it in. And so that means less time that there is a vertical line in the water column. And what my work on the East Coast with North Atlantic right whales, we chartered fishing vessels for our research. And so I learned a lot from the fishers there about. How they're using and trialing this gear and actually starting to now use it to fill quotas for snow crab in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So there's a lot of promise there. It's not a one-size-fits-all model. And so there's still a lot of testing and development, but it shows some promise. And I think it would be not just great for whales, but all animals to eliminate that vertical line.
speaker-0: I imagine, you know, on a in a typical crabbing season, right, there could be hundreds of pots out, right? And so I I almost imagine like a whale needing to navigate through this like maze of of ropes. Mm-hmm. And to your point earlier, which is that, you know, fishers don't want to be entangling whales either, also 'cause that might mean that they're gonna lose their equipment. Exactly. Right. So there's so there's like We all have the same goal in mind in a way, right? Which is we don't want entanglements to happen. Right. And so I can envision a future in which, you know, the crab pot or the ropeless crab pot technology is financially sustainable for the fishers and still allows them to catch their yield and s you know, feed their families. And there's no ropes in the water. And so the whales are doing great. Like this seems like a a a a wonderful win win solution. Sure. If it works out the way that we all hope it would.
speaker-1: Yes, yes. It is like you I think you brought up the finances of it. These traps are very expensive right now as well. So that's another barrier to them being widely used. And in the current configuration of on-demand ropeless pop-up traps, you have what's like a trawl. So you have a few traps in a row that are connected by a ground line. That way the fishers pull up multiple traps at once. And so we also have to address are these ground lines, can we, can we just have one pot per per pop-up line, or do we need to have these ground lines? So there's still a lot of research and testing and funding that's necessary to test this all out.
speaker-0: So you've you've alluded a few times to how you're using drones to monitor populations, but let's geek out on drones.
speaker-1: Yes, I was waiting. Yes, yes, okay.
speaker-0: When are you gonna ask me about So yeah, so walk us through a typical day in the field, let's say.
speaker-1: Sure, sure. So I'll I'll use an example of a survey we would do out of in San Francisco Bay. So this past spring we were surveying for gray whales within the bay. So around Angel Island, Alcatraz Island, there were a bunch of gray whales there this year. We counted 17 individuals based on unique markings on each whale. So we have a rigid hull inflatable boat or a rib. It's about our boat operator's gonna get upset of me if I don't know this. But I think it's 24 feet long. And we take this out out of Saucelito and we get all our gear at the start of the day. We usually start as close to the first light as we can on knowing that I have to drive up from Santa Cruz. And but we bring aboard cameras, so with really high zoom lenses. We have our drone. We've been starting to do some environmental DNA sampling. Yes,
speaker-0: E DNA, yeah.
speaker-1: exactly, which I can get into if you'd like. We've also started to deploy some tags here with Ari Freedlanders group on whales too. So it depends on what our objectives are for the day. But we then kind of run these transect lines. we kind of take a specific route around the bay. When we see a blow, we go blow At eleven o'clock, which means not straight ahead, but just off to the side. And we'll go investigate. Again, trying to keep a few hundred meters distance. We take photographs. We have a software program on a a laptop or tablet where we record how many whales we see, what their behaviors are, if we see mud plumes coming out of their mouth, which means they might be feeding at the bottom. And and we track kind of their movements a little bit over time. Sometimes they do spirals or circles, which is just fun because you're just spinning in a circle in the boat. sometimes it's more linear. But if we if conditions are right, which means winds are low, there's no fog or precipitation, and the sea state is calm, we'll launch the drone, which is my favorite part. And when everyone and when anyone on the boat is like, Gina, do you think we should fly the drone? The answer is like almost always yes. Yes. Or I already have it ready to go. And so drones are not necessarily engineered to be launched from boats. And that is because you can imagine the boat doing this and a drone needing to kind of calibrate which way is up when it starts up. So we have What's called a hand launcher. And so my colleague Norelli, she's our most trained hand launcher. She will sit or stand at the bow of the boat, hold the drone, and usually like really loudly, ready to launch she goes, Ready launching, and we take off the boat, we go find the whale, which can sometimes be tricky. with when you're working on a screen this big and someone's like, It's right over there and you're like, No, it's not. But then there are two joysticks. You kinda can tr can control up, down, turning left, right, moving and forward back. and you fly it over to the whale. Again we get overhead, collect videos. again we can look at the behaviors. We can look at how fat or skinny it is We have a drone with a thermal camera. So I've been continuing to explore heat signatures from these whales. One of my big interests is whether we can detect sublethal trauma, for example, from a vessel strike, with the heat sensing camera. work.
speaker-0: How would that
speaker-1: So just like, you know, you sprain your ankle and you have to put a bag of ice on it and usually it's warm to the touch. There's a lot of blood flow to an injured area. So presumably if a whale is hit on its back, it comes to the water surface. You could see the heat signature at the surface.
speaker-0: Have you have you observed that yet?
speaker-1: We there was one case we had this spring, although it's whales also just dump a lot of heat. They have a lot of blubber, a lot of insulation, and they're, you know, swimming constantly. So I think they're just naturally, they overheat. So we're trying. One of my goals, research goals, is to differentiate what is a normal heat signature from a whale versus what's pathological, meaning it might be injured, sick. We also, I'm very curious if you can detect pregnancy, because there are changes in blood flow during a pregnancy, but that's still TBT.
speaker-0: I was just talking to Ari Friedlander in one of his his postdocs about like a whale pregnancy test. Yes. It requires extracting a little bit of their blubber to do that.
speaker-1: That is another way to do it, yes.
speaker-0: But you think there might be a chance you could do it with a drone based on heat signature.
speaker-1: Right, and then you don't even have to touch it. That's what I love about drone technology is it's all remote sensing, which means you don't have to manipulate or really disturb the animal. so that's one advantage of of the passive monitoring. How
speaker-0: Has drone technology transformed cetacean research?
speaker-1: Yes. Like night and day, I think. I mean, I around then I was just starting my career too and hadn't heard of a drone. But the technology has come so far since then. And it's much more reliable. It hovers very precisely. and the resolution of the cameras is so much better. And I love the kite idea because you don't have to run into battery limitations, which is a big issue still with drones, is usually our flights are fifteen to twenty minutes.
speaker-0: Yeah, it's pretty quick.
speaker-1: Yeah. Which, you know, as soon as I get the drone in the air, I could literally spend all day. And that's like when I see it ticking, the battery ticking down, it's like, no, I could just keep going. But yeah, so there have been there's been a an evolution of the technology since twenty thirteen. Or actually they started doing helicopter drones in twenty ten. And they were flying this helicopter drone with petri dishes through the exhaled breath of a whale. So you can it's basically like culturing the bacteria in your sneeze or
speaker-0: Like a swab like a mouth swab basically.
speaker-1: Get your microbiome or the the whale's microbiome. So they started testing that out in 2010. Then it grew like 2013-2014, John Durbin's group. they were flying these higher resolution cameras over whales and understanding that, yeah, we can measure in pixels or how f wide a whale is relative to its length. And there's a process called photogrammetry where you if you know the focal length of your camera and you know the distance from your target object which is the altitude of your drone you can scale how long a pixel is whether it's a centimeter or two centimeters and actually measure total lengths and now we're getting to body volumes we can estimate if a whale rolls on its side and you get a lateral photo and or video and then it's back straight and you see the top of it, you can three-dimensionally model the volume of a whale, which then people are taking that and saying, okay, if that's the volume, here's how much it weighs. Here's more information about its metabolic rate. Here's how much prey it has to ingest. And so every study that comes out, and man, there are so many, like the the rate of of surveys, the rate of studies using drones is like exponentially increasing. We're learning something new. And that's I mean, if I can continue to geek out, the they're also being used for the blow sampling that I mentioned, the X Held, they're being used to deploy suction cup tags.
speaker-0: so this is like this is like Ari Friedlander's group, right? They currently drive out on a boat and with a big stick they kind of like stick it to the back. Right. But you're you're saying that you could use a drone to do the same thing, just drop the
speaker-1: sticks to the back. Cool. And that's been pretty successful on a bunch of different species. people are using them to fly hydrophones, which are underwater microphones, and like dip them into the water near whales so we can listen while also observing their behaviors to see if they're they make certain certain vocalizations when they're behaving certain ways. and yeah, there's just there's so much more end I think the sky's the limit as with more uses for drones in the future.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's what's occurring to me now, right, is like historical cetacean research, at least like behavioral stuff is like you're in a boat, you're seeing it from the water level essentially. You got to keep your distance. There's only so much you can really see. I mean, when you're at the the water level. Right. and so by adding drones into the equation, it ba basically opens up a you know a hundred and eighty degree like possibility for observation. in a way that like I now it makes sense to me why all these studies are emerging if tr drones have made it, because now we have a whole new set of lenses to look at these animals.
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-0: Not to mention dipping hydrophones in and sticking tags on and all this stuff. And I know the whale lover listeners here are probably also stoked that it doesn't require really any human contact with the animal either. Right. It allows us to keep it keep our distance.
speaker-1: We still so I will say all our drone work over whales is done under under permit. so all research on whales with drones has to be NOAA permit approved. And we do have minimum flight altitudes. So for our group it's twelve meters, but for groups doing the blow sampling, it's it has to be lower. and there is still a an acoustic or noise stimulus from a drone. And so we monitor whales' behaviors for and during a flight and look for any changes that might be elicited by the drone. Occasionally I have seen anecdotally a whale turn and kind of look.
speaker-0: Look at
speaker-1: Yeah, I had a hunt back whale do that once. Fascinating. sometimes it's hard to attribute a behavioral response to the drone versus another whale nearby, but it is something I personally keep in mind that colleagues of mine keep in mind is there is still a noise. There's also a shadow And, you know, we have to be aware that if we start flying a drone over whale every single day, we don't know if, you know, it's cha if their heart rate elevates when the drone's overhead or there's some physiological response to a drone. So I do think while it's much less disruptive than a close vessel approach or, you know, catching a small cetacean like a dolphin or a porpoise and getting your hands on it, much less stressful than that. There's still that concern that we should continue to check in and reflect on what impact we're having on on these animals.
speaker-0: Are you aware of any studies about the impacts of drones?
speaker-1: Yes, people have looked at like the noise envelopes at different depths in the water and found they're pretty minimal. I don't know, I I like to think of it as like a fly in your ear, probably. A lot of times it's probably below the threshold of what these animals can hear. But it is still like, you know, if you're doing your work at your desk and you've got a fly in your ear the whole day. Yeah. That's still kind of annoying. So again, it's something it's an improvement for sure. But something as a scientist I still reflect on and see if we can continue to minimize our impacts on the animal.
speaker-0: You used drone technology in Monterey Bay, I think earlier this summer for a whale known as Duchess of Anchovy. Yes. So so what was your role? What what happened to Duchess of Anchovy and what was your role in in that particular project?
speaker-1: Right. So the Duchess of Anchovy, a humpback whale, was reported to let me back up a little bit. The Marine Mammal Center is part of the California or is part of the West Coast Large Whale Entanglement Response Network. That's a lot of lot of words. But it's a group that includes other partners in the area of trained entanglement responders. So when a whale is reported. Entangled, these people are trained to approach and try to remove the gear. It is a very high stakes, dangerous, requires a lot of training kind of situation. So again, lots we do lots of training with pretend whales and off of our boats to to prepare for the actual thing. And so Duchess of Anchovy was reported by local whale watch operators in Monterey Bay as being entangled. I think the first report was back in May of this year. folks went out, couldn't find the whale, which in is usually the case for a lot of these reports. the the teams in Monterey Bay have really minimized the amount of response time. To get out there on the water. It's amazing how quickly within an an hour, sometimes thirty minutes, they can be on the water. But whales swim fast, weather conditions change, and a lot of times these animals can't be relocated. And then this in May, couldn't find it. So we hoped for the best. But then back in July, early July, it was reported again.
speaker-0: And to be clear, this this this was reported as being entangled, dragging dragging some equipment alongside of her, right? This is what people were seeing.
speaker-1: Yes, yes. And got photographs to confirm that, which is really helpful in these cases. so we got reports again, the entanglement response network assembled a response. what was great was that again, whale watch operators in the area were able to like hand off the whale kind of where one tour says, I gotta go, but another one comes in and stays with it. That that is really helpful for us to relocate an animal. Again,
speaker-0: Keep eyes on.
speaker-1: keeping a safe distance, but keeping track of its movements. And at the time we noticed its body condition had kind of decreased. It was looking skinnier, had some like paris like parasites on it. So we were like, this this gear needs to come off if we can. And we went out that day. So this was Marine Life Studies, the Marine Mammal Center, folks from NOAA and Moss Landing Marine Labs were involved in the response. And we were able to put a telemetry tag on the whale. So this is basically a satellite pinger. It's attached to a buoy with an antenna that pings a satellite when it's at the surface. And it's attached to a line that is has a grappling hook at the end. So a very trained Responder through the grappling hook into the trailing gear off the whale and that way it gets wrapped up in there and we could track the whale's movements in case, you know, we lost sight of it, we can track the satellite pings.
speaker-0: And the trade-off there is like okay, I'm adding something for that whale something a little more for that whale to drag, but the benefit is well we know we're gonna be able to find it.
speaker-1: Right. And sometimes attaching or that extra drag does pull the gear free, depending on the configuration of the gear. So sometimes that's all it takes and then that's a happy out outcome. in this case, the whale it was the weather picked up that day, but we got the int the the telemetry tag on and just before the winds kinda picked up, we flew the drone. So I was able to obtain imagery showing that that grappling hook was nice and solidly in there. And we were able to kind of visualize how the line was wrapped around the tail. And we then when increased C state got rougher, we came back to the lab. We looked at that imagery. We decided how we were gonna cut the gear to have the best possible outcome of of freeing the animal. Cause it's usually asymmetrical. You have gear coming off one side, you wanna know how many wraps you have around, you wanna know. If there's line around the flippers or through the mouth. In this case, it was just around the tail. So we kind of had a game plan and we now had the satellite pinging. So the next day we went out again, located the animal very quickly, again, thanks to the telemetry tag, flew the drone again to confirm that the configuration hadn't changed overnight. Then I continued to fly the drone while our highly trained responders launch a separate smaller boat. They used the line from the telemetry tag to pull up to the whale.
speaker-0: And kinda they drag themselves to the whale in in a sense.
speaker-1: And this whale, I'd say its behavior was almost ideal for response. It kind of stayed at the surface, relatively slow swim. And so a lot of times, if you're yanking on gear that's embedded in a whale's skin, they're not happy about it. And they're not gonna, you know, dive or breach or yes. So this is this was an ideal case. So they pulled up to the animal. And you know, I was able continuing to fly and we try to in real time radio to the team like, the whale's coming to the surface in three, two, one, or looks like one line was removed, but there's still a line over here or still a wrap on this side. And so trying to relay that information and you know, took a couple hours of of you know, backing off the whale, letting it settle. Coming back making a cut. And we there was still they had made a few cuts. We couldn't really tell from above where the line was still anchored on the whale. And so again, the winds were picking up. We were like, well, I guess we'll have to try again tomorrow. And as they were backing off, it must have been the angle that they kind of had on the line still on the whale. They said they heard a like and everything released. And the whale took off. It did not thank us. It was like, peace, I'm out. and we were able to collect all the gear, which can be used for gear identification. We can learn where in the water column that whale might have gotten entangled. yes. So that's very useful information. I'm happy to share that. Duchess of Anchovy was seen days later by the Whale Watch operators and gear free. So that was nice to confirm. So yes, that was a happy, very happy outcome and a good good boost.
speaker-0: Well, thank you for that. I mean, on behalf of all of us that love these animals, like thank you. What a what a wonderful end to that story. It occurs to me that the drones enabled sort of two really important pieces of that operation. Right. One was the initial survey that allowed you to come up with a game plan, right? That mission mission briefing, so to speak, right? Yes. Which because I imagine without that, you know, the the rescue teams go out and they it's probably really intense. It's probably like emotionally hard, like You know, the boat's shaken, you know, the the whale is reacting. There's probably a lot going on. Yes. And if you're having to figure out what to do among all that, right, that sounds really challenging. So to be able to come up with the plan ahead of time, probably makes for the operation to go a lot more smoothly. And then the second thing was like during the actual mission, like to have eyes on the whale as the little boat was going up there to sort sort of like actually do the cutting. Right. Where you could warn them, you could give them information real time. Like that what a cool like capability that didn't exist a few years ago.
speaker-1: Right. And I'm this is one of the first few cases I've I've been now on three four entanglement responses where I've flown the drone and I learn something every time about what kind of information is helpful to relay, when it's good to fly, when it's not, when it's more of a distraction maybe to the actual operations. and so it's yeah, it's again, I continue to have these unintended outcomes of drone use that I never envisioned my path taking. so that's really cool. It's also this footage is great for training opportunities. So we can say, you know, well maybe next time we would have done this or this was a great cut here. That was just how you want to do it on future cases. So that is again more data for for more successful outcomes in the future.
speaker-0: The whale took off as soon as the gear was released. And it and I have to ask, you know, there's some anthropomorphizing here. But to what d degree do you think that there is like a sense of, you know, relief or a sense of like understanding that, you know, these humans are are are helping, right? I mean, is there I know that this is very like this is very like almost like a spiritual question, but like what's your personal feeling on?
speaker-1: I get the question a lot and it's something I haven't really I've never witnessed a whale thank us or, you know, come back and, you know, wave or sometimes the whale will breach after it's free. And while that's beautiful, it's like, is that also a pain response? I think there's a lot we still don't know. But I've had encounters with whales where they approach a boat and they turn and look. you in the eye and you know there's something there that are like actually recognizing you as something also intelligent. Yes.
speaker-0: Yes.
speaker-1: So I've had those moments, not during disentanglement response, that are really beautiful.
speaker-0: Gina, before we go, is there anything else that you wanna hit?
speaker-1: Well, I do want to also share the entangled whale hotline in case you're out and see an entangled whale. So again, get out your phones. Eight seven seven seven six seven nine four two five. Thank you. SOS whale. So remember.
speaker-0: SOS Well, perfect. Thank you.
speaker-1: the other thing, so reporting cases when you see them. I I also want to empower our listeners to be community scientists. The local knowledge you have on these animals is super valuable to these this long-term monitoring. And if you think you see something in a weird place, an animal where you have never seen it before, again, photographing these things and and sharing them with our group is is really helpful. And in addition to all the things you're probably doing day-to-day to help the environment. So shopping local, and you know, understanding where your food is coming from and, you know, biking, walking to work. So all those things help whales. So I'm I'm constantly thinking about whales. Now you can too when you turn the lights off when you're not in a room, etcetera.
speaker-0: Thank you, Gina. Yeah, yeah. We collect questions in our exhibit hall here for our podcast guests. And so we got we got a bunch for you. but I'm gonna just gonna read two of them for you today.
speaker-1: Like my thesis defense all over again.
speaker-0: Except from eight year olds. So it's gonna be even All right. So we got a question here that said, what is the success rate of unentanglements? So once you get them free, how likely will they survive if injured?
speaker-1: That's a tough one to answer. Again, especially with humpback whales, there are many whales. So we it's hard to track them all after they might be disentangled. I should mention that as a community scientist, if you get a photo of the underside of a humpback whale tail, you can send that to Happy Whale, which is a free open website where they use an AI algorithm to match the patterns on the underside of the tail to a catalog. And you can then sign up for alerts to track that whale over time. And we as scientists use that. So if we know the identity of a whale that we disentangled and then someone in Mexico happens to take a photo of that whale, we get alerted and go, awesome, it survived and made it back down to Mexico. So in terms of determining success rate. I'll just share from my personal experience. So I started about a year and a half ago. I've been out on four entanglement responses. two of those were we actually removed gear. One, the whale wound up shedding the gear on its own. The fourth, not sure what happened to it. And but that is excludes all the animals we get reported and then can't relocate, which we get about 12 reports a year, give or take, and it varies seasonally. So hard to give a precise answer to that. But the other thing to keep in mind is that entanglement, even if the whale is freed, is super energetically demanding. It can deplete body condition. It might affect whether a female has a calf that year or not. So there are chronic consequences of being entangled, even though we free them. So I think of entanglement response as a band-aid solution. Ideally, we'll be put out of that job if we're able to mitigate whales getting entangled in the first place.
speaker-0: All right, Gina, one more for you, and this comes from Sienna C. Thank you, Sienna for asking this question. Have you untangled any baby whales or other sea creatures?
speaker-1: Yes. So last year we had a mother check with her calf, which we nicknamed Chex Mix or Yes. that the Chexmix was entangled. And this was a complicated entanglement because there wasn't really trailing line. It was through the mouth and around the flippers. And we spent a lot of days trying to approach the calf. in a way to make a cut and got a lot of drone footage again, but the mother would kind of come between us and the and the calf. And so it was very difficult. And we wound up not actually getting to make a cut. But that is the one case where months later, again a whale watch operator reported, I think this is Chex Mix. We went out, flew the drone, confirmed whale was no longer entangled. Right. So Chex Mix was yes, a calf with its mother and is now swimming free also.
speaker-0: that's wonderful, wonderful way to end this episode. Yeah. Well Gina, thank you for everything that you do. Yes. Thank you for being here today. I've had so much fun in this conversation. I hope to see you again soon.
speaker-1: Yeah, really appreciate it. Thanks for the questions and for bringing more attention to the whales.
speaker-0: Alright, that does it for the pod. Thank you, Gina, for coming on the program today. And thanks to everybody at the Marine Mammal Center, staff and volunteers alike for everything that you're doing for marine mammals along the California coast. Thanks to Edith Belmont for editing. Thanks to Valerie C2 and Libby Palkovax for production. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
