Saildrones and Snotbots in the Blue Anthropocene: Sensing technologies,multispecies intimacies,and scientific storying

Abstract

Drones or unpersonned vehicles are mobile sensing technologies that collapse space and enhance proximity between scientists and marine species. As such, they improve the collection of biological data – images, migration maps, and fluid samples, for example. But while the drone’s benefits to oceanography are apparent, it is less clear what marine species receive for their unintentional participation in data collection. Building on ethnography, piloting experiments, interviews, and scrutiny of public blogs and scientific texts, this article documents two cases of drone oceanography, interrogates the multispecies intimacies they forge and considers what scientists return to marine animals in exchange for their biological data. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration directs ocean-surface Saildrones to follow northern fur seals in the Bering Sea, and Ocean Alliance, a not-for-profit research organization, collects microbes from cetaceans by flying aerial drones, or Snotbots, through their exhale. With the aim of generating more equitable reciprocities in waters that are surveyed by drones and increasingly challenging to live within, this article offers storying, or the building of existential narratives that support conservation through public engagement, as a way of forging multispecies reciprocities in the Blue Anthropocene – an era marked by existential urgencies, technological materialities, and elemental constraints.

Keywords

Drone intimacy ocean oceanography science storying

Drone oceanography: What is and what could be

The use of drones or unpersonned vehicles is expanding, not only in war, delivery, photography, policing, humanitarian interventions, surveillance, and activism, but also in science ( Fish and Richardson, 2022; Sandvik and Jumbert, 2016). The drone’s verticality and mobility; the various payloads it can carry; the size and richness of its images; and its safety, cost, convenience, and democratization (relative to expensive and dangerous helicopters) have made drones popular tools in marine science. In oceanography, drones gather data about species distribution, animal movement, climate change, threats to protected areas, conservation effectiveness, changes in land use, and ecological degradation (Rose et al., 2014). They monitor coasts for poaching and illegal activity, spot whales before large ship collisions, track plastic garbage, aid search and rescue, sample oil slicks to find their origins, identify nesting birds, track wetland restoration, find whales entangled in nets, and instill wonder for the ocean (Maxwell et al., 2014; Olivares-Mendez et al., 2015; Pirota et al., 2017). Drones can also count wildlife more accurately, with greater precision, and with less bias than human surveyors (Hodgson et al., 2018: 1161). They have their limitations: they disturb marine animals, crash, and often make people uncomfortable with their potential for privacy infraction (Christiansen et al., 2016; Fish, 2021). Despite these issues, drones are revolutionizing data retrieval in oceanography. But what remains to be discovered is how drones positively impact the nonhuman lives they inspect.

Drones afford higher resolution vision and closer contact – or the felt experience of closeness – between oceanographers and endangered marine species. This enhanced proximity enables oceanographers to collect more granular data about species. Yet it is less clear what, if anything, marine species receive in exchange for the data about their lives – body images, blood and breath samples, feeding patterns, and so on. Thus far, drone-derived data has yet to influence marine conservation (Johnston, 2019). While drones improve oceanographers’ data collection, their potential to improve the lives of marine species has yet to materialize. The missing link between science and conservation is the public and the economic and legislative support it can generate through pressure on politicians. Beginning by showing how drones mediate interaction between scientists and marine species, this article makes an argument for how drone oceanography could positively affect the existence of ocean life through the development of public-facing conservation media. It offers strategies for better coupling scientific evidence and conservation action – what is and what ought to be.

In A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, Hume (1739) outlines the is-ought problem wherein a claim about what should be is derived from a statement of what is. Hume derided philosophers who attempted to make the spurious leap from empirics to value in such a way as to seem “imperceptible” (1739: 469). With this article I count myself amongst the guilty of transgressing from is to ought, but I hope to do so transparently with this confession. This article makes an empirical is and a more speculative ought contribution to the debate on the responsibilities of science.

Empirically, this article evinces what appears to be: a co-determining relationship between scientists, their instruments, and the subjects they investigate. Using Barad’s (2007) understanding of the entangled relationships between electrons and the instruments designed to record their position and velocity, I argue that marine species, scientists, and drones mutually affect each other. The drone’s technicity affords the scientist a proximity to marine species and orchestrates a bond: the electrons in the drone’s sensors are triggered by photons, the marine animal’s lives are disturbed by the scientific data collection, the scientists are personally moved and professionally enriched by the encounter. This Barad (2007) calls an “intra-action” that forms “phenomena” with polydirectional force for the scientists, instruments, and subjects investigated. This article’s case studies detail the intra-actions that forge phenomena consisting of drones, scientists, seals, or whales.

The second contribution is prescriptive – what ought to be. Intra-action is not only a centripetal force binding actants within a phenomenon but it is also centrifugal expanding outward towards the edges of the phenomenon and beyond. With creative representation by marine scientists these intra-actions may expand and embrace a more explicit politics of conservation. In my move from empiricism to axiology, or the normative philosophy of values, I develop storying within the phenomenon. Storying or science-inspired storytelling, can invigorate public interest, a prerequisite for legal and financial support for conservation (van Dooren, 2020; van Dooren and Rose, 2016). Storying is an ethically responsible act of reciprocity or giving back to the animals whose lives are disturbed by scientific data collection. Stories can become part of the material-discursive entanglement of the phenomenon, but also something that has the power to engage other humans and inspire political sponsorship for conservation. Moving from fact to value, I reflexively argue that drone-enhanced relationships should result in more profound responsibilities to care for marine species.

The first case study examines Saildrone and the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (PMEL)’s Innovative Technology for Arctic Exploration program. NOAA works with the for-profit technology company Saildrone on a basic research project that investigates the diets of northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus) in Alaska by capturing them; attaching video cameras and dive-trackers to their bodies; and following them and their prey, walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma), with autonomous sea-surface Saildrones. After this 2017 project, the Saildrone journeyed north to the edge of the Bering Sea iceshelf to document melting ice amidst climate change. This fieldwork is detailed in scientific publications but also a long-running reflexive blog written by the oceanographers. Important aspects of the story are missing. With fur-seal populations stagnating, walleye populations declining, and the Arctic ice thawing, a storying strategy could embolden public support to conserve seals and walleye. The Saildrone data has yet to inform changes to the management of the walleye pollock or impact the lives of fur seals. The reasons for this – like other attempts to understand species in decline – are numerous and complex. Axiologically, I offer scientific storying as a method that might change this managerial lacuna.

The second case study follows US-based non-profit whale scientists Ocean Alliance (OA) who have developed and deployed the Snotbot, an atmospheric drone that collects data-rich mucus expelled by whale “blow” or exhale. Equipped with Petri dishes, atmospheric drones are guided by expert pilots through the blow of humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae), grey (Eschrichtius robustus), and blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus). OA, too, tells stories with a fieldwork blog complete with graphic tales of adventure and compelling drone images and video. But what is absent in the story of OA is drone science. The whale snot has yet to be analyzed and without this scientific data informing storying the possibility to weave what is with what ought to be evaporates. This article induces from these cases theories of inter-species intimacy and scientific storytelling in the context of the Blue Anthropocene.

Blue Anthropocene

The ocean is elemental: its materiality is volumetric, liquid, fluid, opaque, corrosive, and tumultuous. The oceanic elements afford and constrain science as well as life; they transport and corrode scientific instruments; they fortify and toxify marine animals. Complicating things further, the ocean is transelemental: its waters converge with atmospheric gusts and melting ice, with climate change unpredictably affecting these state shifts. The oceans are more acidic and polluted, hotter, and emptier than ever before in recent history. The oceans have fewer fish, coral, phytoplankton, and sea mammals but more traffic and poachers; they are also populated with semi-autonomous sensors that cruise the water column under the sea, diving under the ice, exploring sea floors and mounts, bobbing and sailing on the surface, and peering down with computer vision from satellites. These sensors carry expectations and aspirations of finding, filtering, and controlling signals made static by ocean noise and technological limitations (Fairbanks et al., 2019; Lehman, 2017; O’Grady, 2019).

Oceanography is a methodical and technological practice of sensing and making sense of ashifting sea and its diffuse inhabitants. As such, it is a contingent execution of epistemological power along with marinescapes and species. Conservation oceanography strives to know and inform the preservation of the sea’s species. Oceandrones emerge from the automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence of the fourth industrial revolution and meet the sixth extinction – a period where current background extinctions are 100 times those of regular rates (Braidotti, 2019; Ceballos et al., 2015; Schwab, 2017). Anthropogenic impacts of the Anthropocene on the ocean include warming, slowing circulation, sea levels rising, and increasing acidification (Tyrrell, 2011). Oceanographers and scholars of that science must attend to this compromised and technologized ocean as well as to how its unpredictable turbulence and swirling velocities modify practice and theory-building (McCormack, 2017; Peters and Steinberg, 2019; Steinberg and Peters, 2015). For now, the Anthropocene is primarily the result of actions of Northern hemisphere industrial capitalism. But the Southern hemisphere is catching up (Krummel and Fraser, 2016). Indeed, there are multiple Anthropocenes with varying markers and impacts – and more to come. The variant that manifests in the ocean, the Blue Anthropocene, situates drone oceanography among other oceanic labors and metabolisms, articulating it within its technological materialities, existential urgencies, and elemental constraints.

My affirmative contribution to the concept of the Blue Anthropocene is a posthumanism that decenters anthropocentrism, arguing that multispecies relationships forged through drone oceanography should strive towards a defense of the autonomy of marine life (Lorimer, 2015). A multispecies approach to the Blue Anthropocene does not accept “natureculture” – the argument that ocean autonomy has ended, that “nature” is a romantic ideal and textual construct, or that nature has converged with culture to form a hybrid “oceanculture” (Haraway, 2007). A response to the Blue Anthropocene is a cosmopolitics of multispecies flourishing through conservation without conflating marine and human life (Malm, 2018; Stengers, 2010). This means the use of science, technologies, and media to inform publics that galvanize policies to differentiate oceans from cultures. Generating stories that inspire these publics and policies may be key to this proposition. With scientific, technological, public, and legal support we may see the emergence not of oceancultures but ocean/cultures – interdependent but different human and oceanic lifeworlds. The two cases that follow propose an origin of ocean/cultures, wherein sensing technologies enable the intimacy of intra-action that informs conservation.

Intra-action and intimacy

The drone is a tool for intimate, interspecies sensing, conveying people and marine animals into closer proximity (Locke, 2017). Barad (2007) provides a way of understanding the relationship between a medium like the ocean or the atmosphere, optical instruments like drones, and that which they explore such as marine animals. Like other new materialists influenced by the relational philosophies of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Foucault, Barad rejects Aristotle’s notion of “substance” or Kant’s “thing-in-itself.” Instead of conceiving things as static singularities, she sees them as constituted by a plurality of dynamic forces and relationships. In lieu of naked being there is becoming with others.

Writing about scientific tools like ultrasound technologies, Barad (2007) argues that such apparatuses and what they observe do not interact but rather “intra-act,” forming a material-discursive phenomenon in which technologies, scientists, and that which they encounter mutually influence each other. As a feminist quantum physicist, Barad’s theory of agential realism draws from physicist Niels Bohr’s theories of wave-particle complementarity wherein quanta – photons or electrons – are either waves or particles depending on the objective of the observing scientists and how the instruments of perception are tuned. Quanta become as they are perceived. The totality of the phenomenon transforms in response to the techniques and technologies of perception. In the context of this article, the oceanographers, seals, and whales – as well as the photons bouncing off their bodies and into the drone’s sensors – are agents influencing their phenomenon.

A more relatable and embodied way of describing how drones contribute to the formation of phenomena is to use the language of intimacy. A togetherness is mediated by technologies that “draw people into new forms of embodied intimacy with themselves and with others” (Weston, 2017: 10). The drone’s technicity of sensual and motile extension converges and enhances seeing and the felt experience of togetherness. For Weston, intimacy is preferred over synonyms such as “[c]loseness, proximity, entanglement, incorporation, suffusion” (2017: 7). With its “generative imprecision … intimacy is capacious enough to carry all these meanings and more” (Weston, 2017: 7). Similarly, Gruen (2015) offers “entangled empathy” or perceptive caring that crosses the conscious, emotional, and species divide and recognizes the responsibilities that come with those intra-actions. Thus, intimate, entangled, and empathic sensing attends to “another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and sensitivities” (Gruen, 2015: 3). In contrast to remote sensing from afar, the sensing made possible by drones may be considered “intimate sensing” – not a “detachment from nature, but of a pleasurable, technological immersion in it” (Helmreich, 2009: 142). The drone affords “data intimacy” between pilots and their research subjects (Calvillo and Garnett, 2019). Intimate sensing and data intimacy describe an increasing richness, resolution, and actionability generated between sensors and bodies. In this manner, drone pilots and the subjects they encounter form ethically entangled, mutually constituted, and never finalized phenomena based in scientific methodologies with conservation possibilities. As an emotional-embodied and discursive-material tactic, dronework implicates pilots, technologies, and that which is explored by the drone – in this case, seals and whales – in co-determining relationships.

Some argue that data intimacies invite a shift from an instrumental to an intrinsic valuation of other species (Plumwood, 2002). Human and animal intimacy mediated by technologies may influence interspecies commitments (Haraway, 1988; Locke, 2017). Sensing can create interspecies conviviality (Braverman, 2014); companionship and care may follow (Youatt, 2008: 409). Drones enable “feeling proximity from a distance” (Paterson, 2006: 692) and can provide “care at a distance” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009: 306). Drones transport the senses of human pilots closer to nonhuman animals. Photons bounce off their bodies, illuminate pixel sensors, and imprint high-resolution images in electron-based storage. Drones carry biological samples from animal tissues to Petri dishes. This data collection is a disruptive act – the animals’ lives are altered. Likewise, access to these animal bodies and fluids impacts scientific careers. As this technological and interspecies phenomenon is a becoming with serious existential consequences, there remains the task of expressing what should become of this entangled intimacy. This leads us to storying and its potential for conservation.

Storying

Nature conservation in a democratic society requires public support. Conservation often begins with scientific data collection about declining animal populations or eroding ecologies. Scientists who want their work to have a practical application in conservation are encouraged to translate their work into comprehensible and stimulating public-facing content. Glossy magazine spreads, colorful internet splash pages, austere documentary films and televisions, podcasts, internet and mobile videos, conservation-themed nonfungible tokens, and metaverse experiences in virtual nature parks are now part of the scientist’s toolkit as they try to render their findings influential towards conservation. Without scientists converting analytical science into popular and immersive media, the likelihood of their scientific findings persuading the public and acquiring economic and legislative support appears unlikely. Without grassroots citizen encouragement instigated by exposure to compelling media, legislative backing and financial funding seem improbable. Media technologies, scientific representation, and empathic publics are thus actants in the lives of species within conservation phenomena.

One tactic exists across these varied representations – storytelling; the effort to translate scientific subjects, findings, and methodologies into character-driven narratives. This science-inspired storying is “ethical work” that requires “responsible thinking” in narrative construction (van Dooren, 2020: 1–2; van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 104). Rose writes of storying as a multispecies collaboration: “[w]here one person’s or species’ knowledge stops, someone else’s knowledge picks up the story” (2013: 104). The goal is that these environmental stories ground values, impact decisions, inform actions, and encourage environmental policies. Stories can solidify or challenge attitudes. They are conflated, travel unintended networks, and are misinterpreted, becoming something other than planned (van der Leeuw, 2020). Regardless of their ultimate impact on conservation, storying remains a cosmopolitical way for scientists to work and “live well with wildlife” (Lorimer, 2015: 191).

Critical theory long argued that science offers narratives that legitimizes hegemony (McClellan, 1992). But today “the prevailing order now finds itself under siege by science. The new narrative does not serve the powerful but exposes their absolute failure” (Hamilton, 2017: 79). Like “indigenous storywork” before it, scientific storywork is a methodology of social and scholarly critique enacted through narrative production and performance (Archibald et al., 2019). Multispecies and scientific intra-actions have qualities for the building of narratives which may inspire publics and from there conservation funding, policy, and management. It is likely naive to have such faith in the consensus building capacity of the networked public sphere and to ignore the agonistic inequities of democracy (Mouffe, 2009). But perhaps this is what ought to be.

Methodology

Based on in-person and phone interviews with drone oceanographers at NOAA and OA, detailed readings of their scientific papers and public field reports, site visits, and reflections on my own drone oceanography, I interpret the drone as a technology that entangles pilots and marine species, making possible multispecies reciprocities and interspecies storytelling in the Blue Anthropocene. As an extension of human mobility and vision, drone piloting is an embodied experience, requires focused attention, and creates elevated states that generate considerable immersion into the subjects it investigates. I have flown drones for over 100 hours and have published accounts of precarious flights, technological foibles, and the heightened views the drone provides ( Fish, 2022b, 2021; Fish et al., 2018). Narrations from pilots from Europe to the Americas and Australasia confirm that far from being a disembodied act, drone piloting is emotionally charged (Garrett and Anderson, 2018; Hildebrand, 2021; Jablonowski, 2020; Klauser and Pedrozo, 2017; Serafinelli and O’Hagan, 2022). My many hours of flight in different countries and terrains proves piloting to also be a discursive, political, and practical act – one that is potentially dangerous, highly regulated, elementally contested, and hotly debated (Fish, 2022b; Fish et al., 2018; Jackman and Jablonowski, 2021). Personal, social, and political resonances link piloting to the drone, beings, and landscapes it flies among and the elements it moves through and across. These experiences inform my understanding of the limitations, possibilities, and intimacies which drones afford.

While I interviewed participants from NOAA and OA, much of the data detailed below was extracted from their public online attempts to story their work. Both groups of ocean scientists conducted experiments with drones and wrote public weblogs detailing their fieldwork with words, videos, and images. These accounts are testament to the mutually-influential intra-actions between technologies, scientists, and nonhumans. New technologies, adventurous personal accounts, and fascinating animals abound in these compelling tales of science in the elements. But while intimacy, intra-actions, and storying are present, we do not find their work influencing the conservation of these species. We need to better link storying to sustainable livelihood through public engagement if we are going to make the shift from fact to value, from is to ought.

The empirical section that follows examines the intimacies engineered by NOAA’s and OA’s drone oceanography. The discussion focuses on the stories made possible by drone data. The conclusion returns to the broad issue of the Blue Anthropocene, offering an interpretation of the role of conservation technologies and storying in affirmative futures.

Saildrone and instrumented seals

It is the summer of 2017 and scientists from NOAA land at a rookery on the northeast side of St. Paul Island, the largest of the four Pribilof Islands of Alaska, between the United States and the Russian Federation. The scientists are here to capture 16 mother northern fur seals and their pups, take blood samples and weight measurements, and instrument them with dive and geographic trackers and video cameras – sensors that collect data about where, when, and how the seals hunt.

A Saildrone, a seven-meter long solar and wind-powered ocean surface drone with a rigid five-meter-high sail, follows the seals as they forage and echolocate schools of walleye pollock, the seal’s most important food (Lowry et al., 1988) and a species that is also highly desired by humans – the walleye population is considered one of the most valuable fish stocks in the world and is a favorite ingredient for McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants (Bailey et al., 2000).

The seals are vulnerable to endangerment, with only 650,000 individuals remaining, or a third of their population since 1980 (Gelatt and Gentry, 2018). The objective of this “basic research” (Mordy, 2020, personal communication) is to discern the seal’s health – discover what they eat, how often, and how much energy is required to find pollock. The researchers return in a week, repeat the capture, and collect the sensors and data about the seals’ and pups’ health. In a warming Bering Sea, this project entangles researchers, seals, and drones in an intimate intra-action, the reciprocities of which I question.

Grafting sensors onto ocean species began in the 1960s, when the US military and its subcontractors began to develop sensing technologies for cetaceans – whales, porpoises, and dolphins. This “military-cetological complex”, as Benson called it (2011: 75), had its problems. Signals from tagged dolphins would vanish, battery power would end, antennas would break-off, electronics would glitch, researchers would look in the wrong location, and wired animals would die or be eaten (Benson, 2011: 76). Despite this, by “rendering individual animals locatable and identifiable, it enabled [conservation biologists and] park administrators to assert a fine-grained disciplinary power in the name of the preservation of wildness” (Benson, 2013: 178). In actual practice, however, animal tagging is messy and contingent with place and species variables that make the disciplining less than successful. Regardless of its efficacy, these conservationists carried the “very American idea” that their care would come to fruition through these technologies of surveillance and control (Benson in Hamblin, 2013: 17).

Capturing a mother seal is a challenge. Large males defend their harems. The scientists study the personalities of the males, identifying which ones might allow them to get close to the females. Dr. Carey Kuhn, the leader of the project, describes the process of crawling to the seals:

there'll be a point when the animals are aware that we’re in close proximity and then they’ll start to get nervous and start to move to the water. And so we have to find that fine line between how close can we get versus not getting so close that we scare everybody. So once we’re ready, we’ll jump up and we’ll run and chase that specific individual and put her in a net as quickly as possible … . (2020, personal communication)

Similarly, Forssman “found that seal scientists spend their time sneaking and crawling through the shit, seaweed, and sand of the shore, trying to gain purchase on their research subjects” (2017: 26–27). Scientists are extremely careful to not injure the seals when tagging them. However, Forssman compares the physical effort by scientists to tag northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) to the work of hunting and killing them. Both hunters and scientists “exploit the on-shore vulnerabilities of these bodies, and seek to capture and characterize them as repositories of energy stores” (Forssman, 2017: 105). Hunting is an intimate act. Anyone who has shot, trapped, butchered, and otherwise rendered an animal understands the importance of knives and the stages of intra-corporeal intimacy which killing makes possible and feeding requires. Life requires interspecies intimacy, with both the living and the dead.

This is the complicated intimacy between scientists and seals on the shore (Figure 1). After the procedure, Kuhn immediately logs in and monitors the seals’ whereabouts: “I am always looking to see where they are. As soon as tags go on them the tags are transmitting to the Argo satellite system. So then I can login on any computer and get their most recent locations” (2020, personal communication).

Figure 1.

Kuhn enacting data intimacies with seals. Photo credit: NOAA Fisheries. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/science-blog/northern-fur-seal-foodstudy-post-1

The Saildrone then quietly tracks the instrumented seals, echolocating their prey, following the geospatial coordinates radiating from their bodies. In 2017, the seals foraged farther from the island than previously assumed and the Saildrone adapted, modifying its transects of the volumetric ocean. Contrast the proximal efficacies of the Saildrone to a research vessel such as NOAA’s 63-meter, 2400-ton stern trawler the Oscar Dyson, and it becomes clear that the drone can get closer to the seals, silently stalking, producing little disruptive wake (Figure 2). “Fish are presumably more likely to react to large ships than small, quiet USVs,” or unpersonned surface vehicles, writes members of the NOAA team (De Robertis et al., 2019: 2). The Saildrone is also substantially less expensive to sail than the Oscar Dyson, more responsive in terms of movement and rapid mission modifications, and can be deployed for longer expeditions (Kuhn et al., 2020: 5). As a sensor platform, sailing athwart the elements of ocean, sunlight, and gusts, the Saildrone’s contribution is intimate yet incremental; it augments rather than revolutionizes possible proximities. Its efficacy requires the deeply corporeal work of capturing seal mothers on shore.

Figure 2.

Saildrone in the Bering Sea with the 208-foot, 2400-ton NOAA research ship Oscar Dyson in the background. Photo credit: NOAA Fisheries. https://www.alaskajournal.com/2016-06-08/unmanned-vessels-deployed-arctic-research

Despite the Saildrone’s advantages, theorists and oceanographers remain skeptical of drone oceanography. Lehman argues that drones construct the ocean into a “frictionless field of data” making scientific work less embodied (2017: 58). These abstractions prepare the ocean for governmental control and corporate capitalization (Lehman, 2017: 58). This oceanic abstraction has yet to occur and if oceanographers had budgetary freedom it would not. Many scientists prefer the research vessel over the drone. “The ship surveys [remain] the gold standard,” NOAA oceanographer Dr. Calvin Mordy tells me (Mordy, 2020, personal communication). “We really see the ship time as critical, but how do we augment in this ever-changing funding environment, right?” asks Chris Meinig, NOAA Director of Engineering, alluding to why Saildrones have emerged as an augmentation (Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, 2018: np). Other NOAA biologists add that Saildrones alone “are not a sufficient replacement for trawl sampling” (De Robertis et al., 2019: 10). “Drones are not the answer,” Mordy bluntly reminds me, “they augment what we need” (Mordy, 2020, personal communication). Saildrones produce different data and in some cases make possible greater intimacies between actants working on and living in the sea.

After NOAA’s 2017 seal mission, the Saildrones sailed north to investigate Arctic Sea ice in the Bering Sea – where it is, what its temperature is, and how it absorbs carbon dioxide and atmospheric acid. Arctic ice is melting and seasonally appearing further north. The seal’s main prey, pollock, follow the ice’s migration away from their traditional habitats. How this receding ice and migrating prey affects the seals is unknown. The Bering Sea is an

ice mediated system. … As we move forward in the next 20–30 years, we expect there to be less and less ice. So what does that mean in terms of not just the ecosystem, but how do we change our approach to monitoring that system? What kind of tools do we need to bring in to do that? (Mordy, 2020, personal communication)

In this manner, NOAA is in a recursive intra-action with technologies, pelagic species, and water as it changes states from liquid to solid and back to liquid. The oceanic heating of the Blue Anthropocene has become an actor in an intra-action that affects how science is performed. This is a reflexive science that is documenting climate change as it adapts to it. Yet while sensor technologies and their proximities to ice and seals inform how science reshapes, they have yet to influence conservation.

In a weblog post, Kuhn reflects while reviewing the seal video: “We get to enjoy some time each day swimming under the surface of the Bering Sea checking out the world from a fur seal’s point of view!” (2017: n.p.) (Figure 3). The instrumented seals and the Saildrones enable data intimacy. “Working with autonomous technologies is allowing us to collect more data than we ever have before. We’re swimming in it!” she writes (Kuhn, 2017: n.p.). After a dive on the research submarine Alvin, Helmreich’s vessel operators similarly claimed that, “[w]e are merging with our data” (Helmreich, 2007: 630). Here the “oceanspace” functions as a “virtual reality through which the appropriately cyborg subject might swim” (Helmreich, 2007: 630). The inventor of animal instrumentation claims that equipping seals with video cameras “gives the animals the tools to show us directly what’s important to them in their life histories” (Marshall, 2011: n.d.). This transubstantiation is, of course, illusory. “Oceanographers do not just merge with their data,” Helmreich admits, “[s]ubmarines do not just dive in unstructured space. And anthropologists do not just soak up culture” (2007: 631). Watching videos of instrumented seals, Haraway does not become her famous cyborg ideal; instead, she experiences “becoming remora” wherein “we have left the garden of self-identity and risked the embodied longings and points of view of surrogates, substitutes, and sidekicks” (2007: 253). Drones mediate data intimacy but individuals remain individuals. Oceans and cultures do not become oceancultures in the Blue Anthropocene. Scientists are personally changed by the experiences – as are the marine species – but individuality is not lost in the phenomenon. This is a relationship of intimacy, not transcendence.

Figure 3.

Actual “swimming with the data.” Video view from diving and hunting instrumented seal. Jellyfish and pollock in the background. Photo credit: NOAA Fisheries. https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/itae/follow-saildrone-2017

Drones have not replaced the work of creeping up on and instrumenting seals. Scientists still capture seals, take fluid samples, and separate mothers from pups. Nor have drones replaced the research vessel. Data intimacies are made possible by sensor systems such as submarines, Saildrones, and seal cameras. Ice, ocean, wind, and sun – and the contingencies of more-than-human intimacies – continue to make this research full of the friction that Lehman (2017) thought would disappear with oceandrones. The vials with seal blood are only the most obvious medium. Oceans and drones mediate this data intimacy. This ordeal exposes how, given that human overfishing and atmospheric carbonization harms seals, we can think about what is response-able – what is politically possible in the Blue Anthropocene. In the discussion, I advance storying as one path towards responding with care to these intimate elemental, animal, and technological intra-actions.

Snotbots, whales, and molecular intimacy

It is 2016 and a team of five whale researchers drive through elephant cactus, mud flats, salt ponds, and mounds of scallop shells before arriving at their research camp on the Sea of Cortez, near San Ignacio, Mexico. They gather themselves and equipment in open skiffs and set out on a windless morning. Sailing for several hours, they turn off their outboard motor and listen. Andy Rogan, OA’s scientific manager, is listening for:

The sound of the largest animal on the planet taking a breath: the “blow” or exhalation of a whale. It can be a difficult sound to explain. At its most practical, it alerts us to the presence of a whale: you often hear a whale blow long before you see it. Indeed, with the mighty blue whales we have studied in the Gulf of California, you can hear the blow from well over a mile [1.6 kilometers] away. Sometimes, you also hear the whale inhale as well. This is more common with different species, such as fin whales, but is a wonderful sound—the sound of a vast cavern filling with air. It also means, of course, that there is the potential for a sample, which is the whole reason we are in Alaska or Mexico or Gabon in the first place. It is always great to hear a blow and then subsequently hear Iain exclaim “BINGO” or “oh, wow, the drone is covered in snot!” (Rogan: n.d.p.)

As the oceanographers float, they listen for surface-swimming whales and watch for their distinctive aerosolized exhale shooting into the horizon. This morning they hear the blow and an embodied attunement begins involving scientists, technologies, and marine species. They sail to within 100 meters of the whale and Dr. Iain Kerr, OA’s chief executive officer, pilots the drone to within 15 meters above a grey whale. With a black blanket over his head to minimize sun glare, Kerr lowers the drone to four meters once it is directly over the blowhole. He pays close attention to the direction of the wind and the angle of the whale’s body. Stewart labels these piloting choreographies “atmospheric attunements” that require embodied coordination with “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans” (2011: 445). Kerr himself takes a brief breath, attuning to the rhythm of the whale’s breathing and the speed and direction of its body so as to predict where the next exhale may appear as a mist, hopefully right in front of the drone.

As the numerous videos on OA’s blog exhibit, whale breath is aerated – shot into the air with an explosive exhale, followed by a healthy gasp of oxygenated gas. Kerr dips the drone at the right moment to two meters above the whale’s blowhole. The drone flies through the air, plunging into moist exhalate that includes ocean water, other organisms, and chemical traces. “BINGO,” Kerr (n.d.a.) indeed exclaims, moved by the experience. The many Petri dishes attached to the drone are loaded with whale snot (Figure 4). The drone captures a sample of microbiota living within the whale and flies the Petri dishes back to the skiff where it is carefully capped and frozen. Relatives of the microbes existing in the whale’s lungs now inhabit the Petri dishes and are destined for a laboratory. Drone whale-blow collection features a level of intimacy through technology that is connected to the whale’s existential breathing.

Figure 4.

Drone’s view of a blue whale before exhale collection. Photo credit: Ocean Alliance. https://whale.org/snotbot-expedition-12-the-view-from-the-360-camera/

Traditionally, cetacean science gathered insights into population, mating, migration, and health from the leftovers of the whaling industry – skin, skeletons, stomach contents, and kill-location data (Burnett, 2012). Cetologists would shoot whales with an arrow from a crossbow that would cut out a sample of blubber. It was violent and caused the whale pain. Kerr has shot many such biopsies and compares the process to drone oceanography:

I almost want to say I don’t feel good. I’ve chased this animal down and wacked it with a crossbow. But when I am up in the air, literally flying down on these animals and I don’t want to call it a day because I’m like, ‘Oh my God, look at that. Look how it swims through the water, look at its pectoral fins, the colors of the lights …’ … I would say it’s actually a far more intimate act with the drone than it is with the crossbow. (2020, personal communication, my emphasis)

Various scientific methodologies – rummaging through whale “grax” or the remnants of a slaughter, whacking whales with crossbows, or piloting drones through whale exhale – forge different intimacies.

At some point in the future, it is hoped, the whale snot will undergo polymerase chain reaction to discern its deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) constitution and find out what lives inside this whale. This is an example of molecular intimacy or “the embodiment of data as mist as a more-than-human assemblage that includes skin, gesture, matter and affect” (Calvillo and Garnett, 2019: 343). In this molecular intimacy, vapors constituting existential livelihoods are transduced into biological information and, perhaps later, scientific texts. The sensing technologies of drone cetology in the Blue Anthropocene are responsive to the turbulence of the atmosphere and the boat rocking in the swell. We await the story that will tell us if the whale is contaminated with the chemical traces of certain human’s industrialism. This story point may help us understand survival in the Blue Anthropocene and inform conservation.

Sensing the storied sea

NOAA and OA scientists engage in multimedia storytelling. Both case studies are drawn from interviews but also blogs and videos self-reported by the scientists. However, scientists do not have to tell stories, influence policy, or engage the public. They need not become bloggers, podcasters, or influencers. But for field scientists, storying is one way to acknowledge the intimacy of their intra-action. The work of science, like a story, unfolds in time and space with characters in labor. Abbott wrote that “reality occurs … as stories, cascades of events” (1991: 227). Science is writing – the textual re-construction of the scientific process. Storying is a methodology accessible to the scientist and their immersive and captivating work with new technologies in close proximity to extraordinary marine life.

Narrative explanations capture the complexity of contexts, time, events, movement, identities, systems of stability, and agents of change. By drawing from but not being subservient to the quantification provided by drones, storying is a narrative method that incorporates the manifold technical, elemental, human, and other animal influences into a fuller, thicker depiction of the process of science, its consequences, and political potentials. Storying incorporates the qualitative and quantitative into a portrayal of the “messy realities of and dynamic interactions between knowledge production and decision making processes” (Turnhout et al., 2014: 155). Scientists are in the best position to narrate their work but they will likely need social scientists, humanities scholars, creative writers, videographers, and artists as collaborators.

By consolidating brief stories of intimate interaction between oceanographers, drones, seals, and whales alongside the consequences of their research, this article identifies gaps in scientific reciprocity – what the humans give to the marine species. In these cases, data intimacies are forged without symmetrical reciprocities. The seals are followed by NOAA’s drones, their bodies instrumentalized. The scientists collect valuable information about the lives of marine mammals and write academic publications in the genre of logical positivism. Accounts of seals, sensors, cameras, and pollock come together to narrate a story on a blog about doing scientific research. But a more political story could emerge from the same phenomenon – a story about a collapsing pollock fishery and the consequences of shrinking Arctic ice.

The potential stories coming out of this drone research are about not only technologies following seals but also precarious survival in a changing sea. Bering Sea ice is migrating northward – and with it the seal’s food. The pollock are intensively fished – a population in the Bering Sea has already been decimated, “the most spectacular fishery collapse in North American history,” writes one historian (Bailey, 2011). Despite the warming sea and receding ice that threaten the pollock and with them the seals, the pollock catch quotas set by the US government remain high, making billions of dollars for fishing industries and fast food industries (Bailey et al., 2000). Regulatory intervention by NOAA to limit this catch has not occurred, voiding the existential reciprocity that data intimacy demands. Saildrone data has been analyzed but its findings have not been integrated into a convincing story that influences fisheries management. In transgressing Hume’s (1739) prohibition, I argue that this is the story that ought to be.

There is a different concern in the case of OA. An important character in their Snotbot narrative might be the microbiota. While compelling blog posts have been written about the adventure of collecting whale snot on the high seas, the whale exhale collected by OA has not been analyzed. Other oceanographers using drones discovered that whales carry microbes from polluted seas (Apprill et al., 2017; Geoghegan et al., 2018; Vendl et al., 2020). Whale bacteria and viruses are involved in a feedback loop with humans, sewage, and other environmental contaminants (Raverty et al., 2017). These drones engage in a “microbiopolitics” wherein microbes expose multispecies entanglements (Paxson, 2008: 17) but have yet to influence conservation policy. Microbiopolitical control is not erosive of multispecies survival, particularly for endangered species whose existence may depend upon human and technological assistance. Drone oceanography could become involved in “microbiome surveillance” that informs “microbiome engineering” – the provisioning of antibiotics, for example, and other medical responses to ill whales (West et al., 2019: 92). Microbiome engineering requires an “instrumentalization of DNA for social ends” – this sociality being the preservation of longstanding whale communities (Franklin, 2003; Waterton, 2010: 160). These possibilities, positively impacting the lives of whales, might begin with telling stories of multispecies entanglement. This practice could instigate public interest, conservation management, and ideally preserve the ocean/culture autonomy of whalehood for future generations.

Whales and seals are not simply “platforms for oceanographic sampling” (Fedak, 2004). Nor are they agents on par with the scientists. Having their story expressed might be existential for these animals. The drones, dive sensors, cameras, and biological materials provide the data from which sustainable futures might be written into conservation policy. Drone stories in the Blue Anthropocene could narrate dependencies and erosions of the life-giving media of the ocean and the air. Subsistence hunting and survival during a climate and pollution crisis – these are the non-anthropocentric messages the whales, seals, and microbes might speak. Technological sophistication, scientific ambition, federal funds – and empathy and care – are needed to hear, document, and transmit these sea stories. But the rich complexity of these stories has yet to be devised for the northern seals and grey whales who were tracked by drones. The creation of marine management policy through public pressure, multi-stakeholder contributions, and scientific insights remains not fully understood (Eden et al., 2006). If written along with scientific analysis, conservation protocols, and the incorporation of multispecies voices, these stories could influence managerial stewardship – the conservation of marine mammal biopower through science, technology, and management.

Stories, however, are not a panacea for extinction. They provide “imagined futures” that are necessary yet slippery vehicles for conservation (van der Leeuw, 2020). The impacts of science on society are never linear. Conservation management considers economic and social factors along with scientific findings, diluting science’s influence on policy. Potential benefits of drone oceanography are tempered by the challenges posed by ocean swells and tempestuous weather, constraining flight regulations, faulty technologies and error-prone pilots, and the disruptions that drones cause to animals. These environmental, elemental, political, human, and nonhuman limitations should temper overzealous celebrations of the transformative impact of drones and stories on conservation. What ought to be, often is not.

Towards an affirmative Blue Anthropocene

Drone oceanography enhances proximity between scientists, seals and pollock, whales, and microbes. Drones allow scientists to increase their sensorial closeness to marine species, collecting more and higher resolution data about these organisms. With some intimate violence and disturbance, seals and whales provide samples of bodily fluids and records of lifeways. This article questions what scientists provide in return. My argument is that drone oceanography is a technological and embodied practice that generates connections to “species with which we necessarily have relations, and arguably, to which we have responsibility” (Youatt, 2008: 409). I argue that these intra-actions between humans and marine animals necessitate a more rigorous and creative form of reciprocity by the scientists and for the seals and whales (Youatt, 2016: 216). One way to achieve that reciprocity is by analyzing the collected data and using it to construct critical stories of survival in a Blue Anthropocene.

Drones are existential technologies for preserving the life of whales and seals – stopping poaching, enforcing marine protection laws, and identifying pollution (Fish, 2022a). I offer storying as a complementary practice that builds persuasive narratives as a way of honoring our multispecies interdependencies. The insights from drone oceanography point to better leveraging the present revolution in robotics, sensors, and networked media to address the immediate moment of oceanic demise. As oceanographers, ocean scholars, and ocean-dependent beings, responding affirmatively to the challenges of the Blue Anthropocene will require drones and allied sensing systems. Lorimer chants: “wildlife needs conservation. It needs science. It needs technology. It needs administration. It needs politics” (2015: 189). Technology plus storying plus public support plus legislation ought to mean conservation. Moving affirmatively with technologies in acts of storying elevates the struggles of marine life, endowing the Blue Anthropocene with the technologies, animals, elements, and reciprocities it deserves.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author recieved funding from a University of New South Wales Scientia Fellowship.

Note

The research for this project received full ethical approval from the University of New South Wales.

Adam Fish is a Scientia Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts and the Media, at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural anthropologist, documentary video producer, and interdisciplinary scholar who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts. Fish employs ethnographic, participatory, and creative methods to examine the social, political, and ecological impacts of new technologies.

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