What’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack? Trying to find a whale in a sea shrouded in fog or roiled by wind.
It’s a daily ordeal for government agencies that use aerial surveys to find North Atlantic right whales and then warn ships steaming toward the endangered animals to slow down. It’s also a headache for scientists who can roam the sea for weeks without seeing a whale.
“I’ve been involved with a lot of projects where we can’t even study the whales because we can’t find them,” said Mark Baumgartner, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “I wanted a way we could … minimize the time searching for them and maximize the time actually studying them.”
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Photo Credit: WHOI