Blogs

Remarkable photos and videos within this informative 11 minute interview with John Durban, a biologist with NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California.

"For the first time, scientists have used an unmanned aerial vehicle to study killer whales from above. The device they're using is a remote-controlled hexacopter with a high-resolution camera mounted in its belly, and the photos it produces are beautiful and full of detail. The images offer an entirely new view of this species.

But scientists aren't taking pictures just because they look nice. The images contain detailed information that scientists can use to monitor the health of individual killer whales and of their population as a whole."