Nordic Aquarium Conference 2026
May 30, 2026
Congratulations Graham Patterson, an M.Sc. student in the Erasmus IMBRSea program, who’s currently specializing in marine conservation and cetacean research.
Graham is about to begin his professional practice in Sagres, Portugal, where he’ll be working on the photo-identification of cetaceans, but he also came to us with an even cooler idea… using drones to collect whale and dolphin blow samples for DNA analysis!
Yep. Science fiction stuff.
This methodology has already shown promising results in projects such as the eWhale program, allowing researchers to track biomarkers and gather valuable genetic information from individual animals without invasive techniques. Combined with more than a decade of photo-identification data, this could become a very powerful conservation tool for understanding cetacean populations.
Needless to say that, once we read the words “drones”, “DNA”, and “cetaceans”, there wasn’t much left to discuss, so we happily transferred Graham 300 euros to help support this project and get those flying whale snot collectors into action!
Go, Graham!
And remember: if the whales start demanding privacy rights after the DNA tests… we were never involved.
:p
