A drone instead of a close boat approach, with cutting poles or grapples. A safer way (for whales and humans) to free a whale from a line net.
Entanglement in fishing gear and rope is one of the biggest threats whales face worldwide. Trapped lines cut into the skin, stop the whale from swimming or feeding, and without help, the animal dies slowly and painfully.
Current disentanglement methods are difficult and can be dangerous. Teams have to bring a boat, with disentanglement tools, right up to an entangled whale. The risk runs high on both sides.
Ocean Alliance is changing that. The organization has spent years using drones to collect samples and tag whales without ever touching them, and is now adapting that same SnotBot technology to take on disentanglement directly.
The new drone-assisted system will be able to:
- assess how severe an entanglement is,
- deploy a short-term tracking buoy so the team can keep following the whale,
- bring a cutting tool to entanglement lines to cut them and free the animal step by step,
- collect behavioral data after release, to understand the long-term impact of entanglement.
The result: a process that's safer for both whales and the people trying to save them.
One SnotBot drone costs $4,700. Over its lifetime, a single drone can help hundreds of whales, through tagging, sample collection, and now disentanglement. And when a drone eventually retires from Ocean Alliance's fleet, it doesn't sit in storage. It gets passed on to other organizations around the world, so they can learn the same protocols.
Help fund a drone that will keep saving whales across the ocean for years to come. 🐋
