What Are Blue Whales Doing Underwater?
What Are Blue Whales Doing Underwater?
Giants of the Sea, Part 2
Shots of people standing at the prow of small rubber motorboats, moving quickly through the ocean. They wear helmets and hold long poles.
JEREMY GOLDBOGEN (Assistant Professor of Biology, Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University): The first couple of times you tag a blue whale your legs are shaking, and you're trying to just focus and make sure you get that tag in just the right spot.
In an aerial view, a boat comes up behind two large blue whales, swimming close to the surface.
DAVID CADE (Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Marine Sciences, UC Santa Cruz): So, you're on this boat and you have about a 20-foot pole…
Various shots of people at prow reaching out poles to breaching whales’ backs and attaching a device via suction cup.
CADE: …and you're trying to get as close as you can to this animal, and you have a four-second window in which to get the boat close enough to put it on the animal and then get out of the way.
Animated title text appears: Giants of the Sea, Part 2: What happens under water?
Jeremy Goldbogen walks down a hallway in research offices. A dog plays beside him.
GOLDBOGEN: I run the whale biomechanics lab here at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California.
Large wooden sign reads, “Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.” An exterior wide shot of Hopkins Marine Station buildings, sited on a rocky coast with waves breaking in the foreground.
Goldbogen speaks in his office. Text identifies him as Jeremy Goldbogen, Assistant Professor of Biology, Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.
GOLDBOGEN: Our specialty is using suction cup-attached tags that allow us to track and study whales underwater.
Goldbogen and Cade hold and adjust whale tags with suction cups. The tags are a little larger than the size of their hands.
GOLDBOGEN: So, we use new tag technology to pry into the intimate daily diaries, is what we call it, of whales as they're swimming and foraging underwater.
A man and boy look out at a pod of whales from the deck of a ship.
CADE: People have been fascinated by whales for thousands of years.
Waves break over a large beached whale carcass.
CADE: They wash up on beaches and people are like, “What is this thing? What is going on?”
Aerial view of a whale swimming near the surface.
CADE: They're this massive animal that lives in the ocean and you can only see it at the surface.
Cade speaks from his office. Text identifies him as David Cade, Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Marine Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.
CADE: And for thousands of years that's kind of how people studied them.
Faded archival film footage of a large whale hauled aboard a whaling ship.
CADE: They could study specimens that were killed on whaling operations…
Drone footage of two distant whales spouting.
CADE: …and they could study the surface behavior. For that brief moment in time they could study what the animal's doing.
Cade speaks from his office.
CADE: For the most part, at the surface, these whales are just breathing.
Overhead view of a whale spouting at the ocean’s surface, then diving below.
CADE: So, for most of the life cycle they're not really observable. They're going down to very deep depths very quickly and doing something.
Goldbogen speaks in his office.
GOLDBOGEN: So, we take our tags and tagging pole with us as far south as the Antarctic, and as far north as Norway.
People unmoor a rubber motor boat from a dock and head out into the ocean.
GOLDBOGEN: But we do a lot of our work right here off the coast of California where in Monterey Bay we're really lucky to have one of the densest concentrations of blue whales in the world.
Researchers in the small boat motor across the open ocean. One person stands in the bow with the tagging pole.
GOLDBOGEN: So, in just an hour's cruise from a nearby port here, you can be surrounded by blue whales in the summer months of July, August, and September.
Drone footage reveals a wide shot of two blue whales followed by two small boats.
The exterior of an academic building. A sign reads, “De Nault Family Research Building.”
GOLDBOGEN: Since we started in 2014,
Close-up of a suction-cup tag on a workbench. Researchers make adjustments to tags.
GOLDBOGEN: …we have collaborated with a small company to build over 50 of these tags and we've now tagged several hundred whales.
Cade stands in front of computer monitors, displaying a suction-cup tag a little larger than his hand.
CADE: This is one of my favorites. It's got the forward-facing and the backward-facing camera here.
Diagram of the tag shows its placement area on a whale’s back—just behind and a little lower than the dorsal fin. An image of the tag indicates locations of front and back cameras, as well as a small, square GPS sensor near the front camera.
CADE: It's got a GPS sensor here. GPS is a little bit challenging on a whale. So, you can't get GPS signals under water,
Cade holds tag in office space.
CADE: …so, you actually only get the signal for that three-second period…
Aerial drone footage of two whales swimming near the surface.
CADE: …where you're supposed to find every satellite in the sky for that three second period as the whale surfaces and then goes back underwater.
Cade indicates features on a tag.
CADE: It's got the sensor package up here in the front.
A diagram illustrates the location of a small circuit board near the GPS sensor and front camera on the tag. An inset shows a close-up of the circuit board and text reads, “accelerometer, magnetometer, gyrometer.”
CADE: It's just this little circuit board, is actually all the accelerometer, magnetometer.
Cade speaks in his office, holding the tag.
CADE: The reason that we've been able to do some of this work over the last 10 years is largely because cell phone technology has driven these sensors so small that there's a market for that and then we can take advantage of that.
The researchers’ small rubber boat pulls up behind a whale swimming close to the surface, and tags the animal as it breaches.
CADE: But what's cool about these tags is that they are all suction cup based.
Cade speaks in his office, holding the tag.
CADE: So, it doesn't actually hurt the whale at all. It doesn't puncture any skin or anything like that.
Cade demonstrates the suction cups by slapping the tag down onto the desk.
CADE: And it basically just sticks on to the whale's back and just stays on there for six to 24 hours. Then eventually the suction fails and then the tag will float to the surface.
Cade pries the suction cups off the desk and indicates a flexible antenna on the back of the tag.
CADE: And then we'll recover it with this antenna that's sticking up out of the back there.
A researcher stands at the prow of a rubber boat speeding through the ocean, while two researchers film and photograph in the middle of the boat.
CADE: So, we have this long pole and a boat and what you'll see out here on the side is this whale start to surface up…
Cut to Cade watching this same footage on his office computer monitor.
CADE: …and we're basically timing it so we can do an approach from his side, so we don't bother him.
Back in the original footage, a large whale surfaces just in front of the boat and the researcher reaches out with the pole to attach the tag to the animal’s back.
CADE: And then right when he's committed to surfacing, we're going to accelerate right up to him and on the end of this pole, which is about 20 feet long, we'll drop this tag onto his back.
Cade speaks in his office.
CADE: Huge team effort, right? Like you have to work with the driver, you have to work with the other people on the boat to actually take pictures, you have to work with the spotters. You usually have about six or seven people out in the water actually working to get this this data on these animals.
Split screen shows the views from the front and rear tag cameras. The tag is still attached to the researcher’s pole at this point, so the front view shows the ocean and the rear camera shows the antenna and the trailing boat.
CADE: So, if I was going to show you what that same process looked like from the tags’ perspective, on the left-hand side you have this forward-facing part of the camera and on the right-hand side you have the backward-facing cameras.
Cade speaks while watching the footage on his computer monitor.
CADE: Basically, the whale's going to approach here, come up on the left-hand side. We're going to accelerate up there.
Split screen of front and rear tag cameras..
CADE: We're moving faster and now there's the whale and now we're on the back of a whale.
The whale’s back appears suddenly in the front camera and shortly after the tag is attached, water fills the screen as the whale goes below.
Cade indicates footage on his computer monitor as he talks.
CADE: Up here on the left-hand side is going to be the whale's head and back here is the tail.
The original footage shows the massive body of the whale on the bottom half of each split screen—head in the front camera, and rear in the back camera. The flexible antenna can be seen in the rear view.
CADE: And this right here is the antenna from the tag that we actually use to recover the tag.
Goldbogen and a man with a camera examine one of the suction-cup tags on the deck of a boat.
GOLDBOGEN: They're sampling at really high resolution. So, for example, the whale's movement is measured at several hundred times a second.
Cade leans overboard to pull up a tag floating on the ocean’s surface.
CADE: As technology's improved and our sensors have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller, that's easier and easier to do,
Goldbogen and others examine a suction-cup tag onboard a boat.
CADE: …and to get more and more data over a longer time span with more resolution.
Cade speaks from his office.
CADE: So, we can finally now start to interpret and determine what are these whales doing when they go underwater.
Credits roll:
The “Marine Biology” Seminars on Science is made possible by OceanX, an initiative of the Dalio Foundation, as a part of its generous support of the special exhibition Unseen Oceans and its related educational activities.
Director / Producer
Karen Taber
Producer / Editor
Ben Tudhope
Post Producer
Kate Walker
Title Design
Timothy J. Lee
Special Thanks
The Goldbogen Lab at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.
All footage & images taken under permit NMFS 16111/21678.
© American Museum of Natural History
Blue whales may be the largest animals on Earth, but they’re also among the most mysterious. State-of-the-art tagging technology now allows researchers to collect new kinds of data about these incredible marine mammals. In Part Two of our four-part Giants of the Sea series, learn how high-resolution sensors are giving scientists a window into the daily lives of blue whales. Accelerometers, magnetometers, GPS trackers, and cameras are bundled on a suction cup-attached tag that allows blue whale researchers to track and study the animals underwater. The smaller sensors in this new tech provide a wealth of information in a tiny package.