SnotBot®

SnotBot® is a modified consumer drone that flies through the blow of a whale and collects exhaled “snot” on petri dishes. This blow contains a treasure trove of valuable biological information: DNA, stress and pregnancy hormones, microbiomes, and

potentially many other biological compounds and indicators of the animal’s health and ecology. This non-invasive tool is safer for the animals, inexpensive, and more effective for the user.

Why we need SnotBot

Whales and dolphins today face more threats than ever before, and these threats are diversifying and intensifying. Many are critically endangered.

If we want to protect these animals, we need bold, non-invasive, innovative solutions that enable us to collect more affordable and better data to understand these threats and how they affect the animals. At Ocean Alliance, we believe that the solution is drones!

The purpose of Ocean Alliance’s SnotBot program has been to explore and push the boundaries of this new research paradigm, determining what data can be collected with a drone and how best to collect it. SnotBot provides many benefits when collecting biological samples from whales: it is non-invasive, we get a wide range of data, and it is relatively affordable.

Advantages of SnotBot

Democratizing science: A single tool that can collect a wide range of data but costs relatively little represents a paradigm shift in how we study whales. Drones can empower groups in the developing world, enabling them to conduct research and collect data on marine mammals that they would not be able to do using the research vessel model.

Dr. Roger Payne founded Ocean Alliance on the premise of studying whales without doing them harm. Especially when working with endangered species, it is vital to avoid adding to the stresses facing the animals while conducting research.

A vast range of data: the blow samples that SnotBot collects contain DNA, stress and pregnancy hormones, microbiomes, and possibly other indicators of the animal’s health.