Saving Seafood

Inflatable vessel to help Maine improve disentanglement efforts

December 24, 2015 —  With recent funding from the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund, the Maine Department of Marine Resources has taken another step forward in its ability to lead whale disentanglement efforts.

The $20,000 grant will be used by the DMR to purchase a soft bottom inflatable boat that can maneuver more safely and effectively when Maine Marine Patrol, along with key DMR staff, respond to entangled whales.

“Often, responders have to pull alongside an entangled whale which might surface underneath the boat,” said DMR Scientist Erin Summers, who is coordinating the purchase. “A soft bottom boat will move and form to the body of the whale, making injury to the whale less likely. A hard bottom boat is also more likely to tip when hit from below, which could endanger the responders.”

Read the full story at Wiscasset Newspaper

 

Maine to acquire soft-bottom boat for whale entanglements

December 20, 2015 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — The Maine Department of Marine Resources is getting a $20,000 grant that it will use to help make it safer for its staff members to respond to whale entanglements along the coast.

The grant from the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund will be used to purchase an inflatable, soft-bottom boat that will be used by Marine Patrol to help free whales from ropes in the ocean, the state agency announced in a prepared statement released this week.

The agency currently uses one or more boats with rigid, v-shaped hulls to deal with entanglements, but such boats can pose a hazard both to whales and the people in the boats if the whale should surface underneath the vessel, according to Department of Marine Resources staff. The hard bottom is more likely to injure the whale, which already could be sick or injured, than a soft-bottom boat. A hard-bottom boat also is more likely to tip or capsize if the whale pushes it up out of the water.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

 

Drones for Good: Tiny Flying Robots Help Protect Endangered Whales

August 7, 2015 — A crowdfunding project called Snotbot, which aims to fund quadcopter-enabled research of whales by collecting their projectile exhalations, has been getting a lot of attention.

It hasn’t hurt that Snotbot has a high-profile fan and patron: Patrick Stewart, the actor best known for helming the Starship Enterprise and leading the X-Men on small and big screens worldwide, appears in the project’s fund-raising video.

But Snotbot is not alone. Since 2013, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been using multi-copters to collect whale snot and high-resolution full-body images of endangered great whales.

After testing multiple iterations of drone hardware and software designs on expeditions off the shores of New Zealand, Chile, and New England, the team has arrived at their current flier of choice: a six-propeller multi-copter 32 inches in diameter, equipped to collect both images and breath samples from endangered humpback and right whales while the creatures are swimming at sea.

Read the full story from TakePart