January 10, 2013 — The central Gulf of Maine, where North Atlantic right whales, the most endangered whale species on Earth, and other whale species are known to gather in the fall, is remote and the weather is usually horrible.
But in November, Baumgartner, his WHOI research partner, glider specialist Dave Fratantoni, and a team of researchers and crew from WHOI, the University of Rhode Island, the National Marine Fisheries Service, New England Aquarium and University of New Hampshire released two electric robot gliders in the area known as Outer Fall.
A robot glider has a battery-powered electric buoyancy pump that fills a ballast tank, causing it to sink. Its stubby backswept wings provide lift in the water, much as they would in air, and it glides down while traveling forward until it approaches the bottom at 600 feet. Then, the pump discharges the ballast water and the glider rises to the surface.
During their recent trip to the gulf, researchers repeated this sawtooth pattern for weeks, the voyage guided by programmed GPS locations.
Baumgartner's robots carried a bottle-shaped instrument that uses hydrophones to listen for whale calls. When a call came in, the instrument, known as a DMON, scanned through a library of stored whale sounds and identified the species. Other instruments collected data on environmental conditions, such as water temperature, salinity and even the type and density of the plankton in the area.
Every few trips to the surface, the gliders paused to send information to a satellite that relayed the data back to WHOI. In heavy seas, a balloon inflates to hold up the tail so the antenna is clear of the water.
"It's a nice platform to put together stories about why whales are in particular areas," Baumgartner said.
A little over two weeks later, when he went out to retrieve the gliders and take oceanographic and zooplankton samples, Baumgartner already had enough environmental information to know that bottom temperatures were abnormally warm and that there wasn't enough food out there to support a major aggregation of whales this year.
"Before I left the dock, I knew it would be a strange year for whales," he said.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard Times