Archie joins the science crew

Sperm whale at the surface. (Luis Lamar, Advanced
Imaging and Visualization Lab, WHOI)

Today has been another full day here over the Kaikoura Canyon. Our routine of looking, and especially listening, for sperm whale continues. We are finding sufficient animals to do what we need to do and have attached two more Dtags. The first detached as programmed and is safe in the lab downloading its data files. The second is still traveling with its whale and will hopefully release later this evening for recovery before the weather turns.

Meanwhile, other aspects of the science plan are beginning to come into focus. Don LeRoi and Wayne Perryman, our aerial imaging crew, have been working hard to get ready for prime time. Getting an Aerial Remote Controlled System (we call it Archie) in a state of mind to be able to launch from a rolling, moving ship is not trivial. Lesser birds have failed to come home. Watching Don and Wayne work through the programming and calibrating of the gyro-controlled system has been as if a pair of anxious parents were readying a favored, but queasy child for school for the first time. This afternoon, Archie was finally ready--he took off and flew around the ship, took some video and came back again.

This may seem small beans, but for us it is a huge step forward. The next step is to fly Archie from the ship over a whale and photograph its body shape to get an index of body condition. We have used such data in the past from full-sized aircraft to make inferences about how body condition impact the growth, development and reproductive success of various whale species. We hope that Archie will become a regular tool in the toolbox for whale biologists.

Here is a quote (and a video) from Archie's proud parents about their charge's first test flights:

Today, February 20, the Aerial Remote Controlled Sampling (ARCS) system team struggled with the challenge of calibrating the aircraft’s gyros on a ship that was pitching and rolling in the seas left over from last night’s heavy swells and winds gusting over 20 kts. By afternoon, the winds had dropped, and after attempting to use a gyro-stabilized stand that we had constructed for this cruise we found that we could time the calibration to occur in a brief motionless moment in the ship’s roll pattern.

Once the calibration was completed, we made a short, low-level test flight to ascertain the platform’s stability. After this first flight, the bird was dubbed “Archie." We then performed three more successful flights near the vessel, each a little farther from home, until we were confident that the flight characteristics were not impacted by either the ships motion during calibration or the ship’s magnetic field when Archie was near the vessel.

Footnote: As this post went to press, Julie van der Hoop revealed that data from today's first tag recorded dives of up to 1,400 meters depth--about 4,600 feet, or almost one mile down.