A calm day might find Kirk Linaje sitting on a dock or in a boat in the Middle Florida Keys, launching a small drone with big capabilities into the air. Out in the waters of the estuaries around Grassy Key, some 160 wild bottlenose dolphins swim, subjects of a long-running study by the Dolphin Research Center that now benefits from leaps in technology.
Once aloft, the drone hovers between twenty-five and fifty feet above the marine mammals, and Linaje takes advantage of the clear and shallow Keys water to observe when a dolphin might break the surface for a breath. At the right moment, he snaps a photo that will assess that animal’s body condition—and more amazingly still, directs a petri dish suspended from the drone to catch droplets of breath when it exhales through its blowhole.
The drones—just a fleet of two, for now—are the result of a partnership between the Dolphin Research Center and another nonprofit, the Miami-based Marine Order for Research and Action through Environmental Stewardship (MORAES), whose mission is to help young ecologists stay in Florida through internship opportunities. With a special permit from NOAA, the dolphin biologists gather information on the marine mammals’ distribution, movement patterns, and birth and death rates. There is already a wealth of data. “In addition to conducting research with the resident animals that live here, our field study of wild dolphins dates back to 2013,” says Emily Guarino, a researcher and trainer at the Dolphin Research Center.
While the drone hasn’t replaced the center’s other study methods, it is paving the way for less intrusive data collection. Sans drones, for example, researchers would need to use a biopsy dart to take a tissue sample. “Instead, we just pass the petri dish through that cloud of breath,” Linaje says. “We no longer have to touch the animals or harm them in any way to get genetic information.” The photos provide other valuable insight; with the help of specialized software, a single shot can yield data like length and weight. “The non-invasive method is offering new insights into how these incredible animals are adapting to environmental changes in Florida Bay,” says Andy Walker, the director of the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, which in part funded the study.
These are methods other dolphin researchers can emulate. They are not, however, for the public to try, Guarino stresses. (In other words, please don’t fly drones at marine life.) Before even trying it on wild dolphins, Linaje and Guarino collaborated with the resident dolphins at the center, spending several months acclimating them to the drones with positive reinforcement and calibrating the software to yield accurate data from the photos. So far, in the wild, the dolphins have been minimally disturbed; Guarino recalls one dolphin performing a “spy-hop,” surfacing to be able to hear for a moment.
The long-term game is to learn as much about bottlenose dolphins as possible. “If we are going to respond to the needs of this species, we have to understand them,” Guarino says. “All of this information—where they’re moving, their birth and death rates, their population structure—is relevant for regulatory agencies.” Aside from their intrinsic value, dolphins are sentinel species that require many of the same resources as humans and share the same sensitivities to environmental changes and pathogens as we do. And, Guarino adds, “we study their behavior, their cognition, their acoustics because we need to translate them to the rest of the world. If we’re expecting people to care about these species and to conserve them, we have to connect people to them.”
Meanwhile, the technology just keeps improving. “We are able to go places we weren’t able to go before, and look at things in ways we weren’t able to before,” Linaje says. Next up? Submersible drones.
Support the Dolphin Research Center here and MORAES here.
