Past
Research
Programs
— Since 1970
Southern Right
Whale Program
Ocean Alliance’s Southern Right Whale Program has been running since 1970, making it the longest-running study of a great whale anywhere on the planet. Since 1996 it is led in collaboration with the Instituto de Conservación de Ballenas in Argentina. The purpose of this program has been to study and protect the Southern right whale.
This program’s long-term nature has contributed significantly to our knowledge of how whales live their lives, and how their populations change over time in response to environmental and human-made changes. These insights are proving increasingly crucial at a time when our oceans are changing faster than ever before in human history.
— 2000
Voyage of
the Odyssey
In the late 1990s, Ocean Alliance became increasingly concerned about pollution in our oceans and how little was being done to study this pollution and bring it to light. With this in mind, we started planning a major expedition, and in 2000, the Voyage of the Odyssey was launched.
This was the first-ever global study of pollution using a single species — the sperm whale — as an indicator. The five-year expedition did much to uncover the alarming pollution levels in the world’s oceans.
— 2010
Deepwater
Horizon oil spill
Building upon the Voyage of the Odyssey, and in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we launched a five-year program in the Gulf of Mexico in June 2010.
Our mission — to determine how the oil spill, and the unprecedented use of chemical oil dispersants after the spill, are impacting whales.
— SINCE 2015
SnotBot
SnotBot is our original drone program. SnotBot is a modified consumer drone that flies through a whale’s spout, or blow, collecting the biological data within.
At Ocean Alliance, we closely examine the DNA, hormones, and microbiomes found these biological samples. The program started in 2015 and continues to this day. So far, we have conducted SnotBot expeditions in 6 countries and collected well over 1,000 respiratory samples from 9 whale species.
