October 28, 2019 — The New England Aquarium and Cambridge-based engineering company Draper have some big news: They’re working on technology that will allow them to monitor whales with satellites in space.
Leaving the planet to watch whales might sound a little silly, but the ability to do it could represent a giant leap forward in our ability to protect these animals and our oceans.
“Counting whales from space is really important to providing the scientific justification for [identifying] places in the ocean that are special and need protection,” says Kelly Kryc, director of conservation policy and leadership at the New England Aquarium. She adds that if we know where the whales are, and where they’re likely to go, we can try to limit human activity like fishing, shipping and energy exploration in those places.
Currently, when scientists look for whales and other large marine animals, they almost always do so from boats or planes. But these methods are weather-dependent, costly, sometimes dangerous, “and you can only go out infrequently, so you don’t get a very good sense of what’s happening at a high resolution in both time and space,” Kyrc says. If we could watch them from space, we could do a better job tracking them over longer periods of time, she adds.