Atlantic Right Whale Photogrammetry

In the study of biological systems we learn most about plants and animals buy collecting specimens of various ages, measure them weight them, check their sex, get their age at maturity, feed them and measure growth rates etc. We might put radio collars on some of them and let them go to follow migratory patterns and observer habitat usage. There are many kinds of studies that can be done. However, when your subjects are born weighting 5000 lbs, and grow to 45 feet long weighting up to 60,000 lbs you may have a problem. Add to this that the animals have this habit of ‘disappearing’ from our view about 45 minutes of every hour and you have a very difficult animal to study. Of course I am referring here to the study of cetaceans or whales, and specifically in this instance to the study of the North Atlantic right whale, considered the most endangered of the great whales in the ocean today. Their population has hovered around 320-350 animals for many years and show little signs of recovery in spite of years of protection through the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act and the moratorium on whaling adopted by the International Whaling Commission. Biologists today are studying these animals to try and understand why their recovery to some optimal population level is so slow. We know man has impacts beyond simply harvesting the animals directly, our ships strike animals resting on the surface and sometimes our fishing gear gets tangled around the whales. Either of these two events can cause death in these animals either immediately or after some time if an infection sets in.


Many of the questions that we ask can only be answered by approaching the animals and collecting small skin and blubber samples to look at the genetics, sex, and perhaps contaminant loading picked up through their food chain. Of course we would prefer to not disturb these animals at all if possible to collect data that will help us understand their plight.

Right whales were named that because they were the right whale to hunt. They floated when killed, gave lots of whale oil and to stayed near the coast (out to100 miles or so). They also travel from the coast of Florida in the winter months to US/Canadian waters in the summer. A large area to cover and study. This range in travel and the fact that they are coastal, makes them perfect candidates for aerial platforms to study them.

NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center has been working with the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center for 10 years conducting surveys of cetaceans and seals along our coasts. This collaboration has been extremely successful in planning and executing surveys for many species. The engineering division at AOC assists us with hardware development and mounting on the aircraft in accordance with FAA regulations, the maintenance group responds to the required maintenance intervals by traveling anywhere the plane is working to conduct the required periodic maintenance inspections. AOC’s planning and coordination of these maintenance events results in minimal down time for the aircraft compared to contracted platforms. This year NOAA’s Twin Otters flew 45 hours in support of the Right Whale Photogrammetry mission.

Most recently the aircraft’s mission has been to study the right whale through the use of surplus military reconnaissance cameras. These cameras are custom mounted into the belly window of the NOAA Twin Otter aircraft (see photo) and through the use of motion compensation and a radar altimeter allow for precision photographs. These photographs are used to identify individual right whales due to unique patterns of callosities on their heads. Additionally we can take detailed measurements of the animals from these photographs and get overall length, width and fluke width to name a few. These measurements can be used to obtain a measure of the condition of the animals, lean or malnourished animals readily stand out as do pregnant females.
This study, just finishing up its third year has some exciting results already and which will only continue to expand as more years worth of data track individuals throughout their life span. The NOAA aircraft and their skilled pilots are critical to this mission for NOAA. The aircraft is perfect to carry the instrument and the staff needed to operate it in a safe and practical methodology. The Twin Otters large wing surfaces and powerful turbine engines actually allow the plane to go low and slow with minimum risk. The aircraft is very quiet in the survey mode and appears to have little to no obvious effect on the animals below. The pilots quickly learned the difficult tasks of acquiring targets and making passes minimizing the pitch and roll characteristics of the aircraft, maintaining constant altitude and lining the animals up directly below the belly window.

The partnership of AOC and NMFS to collect critical biological information on our most endangered species of great whales will hopefully continue into the future and perhaps through this joint effort offer some insights into their survival.