How Drones Are Helping Scientists Study and Protect Endangered Whales

The above video was provided by Intel. If you’re a six-foot human standing on a paddleboard, it’s just as well you don’t know that a 60-foot, 40-ton humpback whale with 16-foot flippers is surfacing directly beneath you. The only thing more unsettling would be if there were four 60-ft., 40-ton humpback whales with 16-foot flippers doing the same. Just such a don’t-look-down moment played out off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2016. Ordinarily, it would have been the kind of experience that the paddleboarder—who came through unharmed—would have described to his friends with a helpless “You should’ve seen it.” As it happens though, his friends did see it, as did more than 200 million people so far on Facebook, YouTube and uncounted other websites around the world. It was thanks to Jordan Lerma, a self-taught marine scientist and drone pilot living in Hawaii, that the encounter was preserved at all. In the past few years, Lerma has captured a lot more scenes like that one, building a following on Instagram and elsewhere both as a photographer and videographer with a keen eye for nature, and as a pioneer in the use of drones to study whales and to protect them from extinction. “The work takes patience,” he says. “You have to be able to predict the behavior of the whales and of the drones, but it’s worth the effort.” TIME Special Report: The Drone Era Lerma, 26, who was born in Haw...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Drones Source Type: news