“The only time I get to see a whole right whale is when it’s dead on the beach,” says Moe Brown. She is currently the senior scientist at both the Canadian Whale Institute and the New England Aquarium's Edgerton Research Laboratory, where she’s been since 2004. “Compare that to studying bison, elephants, any of the big land animals. You get to see the whole animal! You can see them interacting with their own kind, with their own habitat. You’re not guessing what they’re doing for the other 45 minutes in an hour.”

Brown is somewhat of a legend in the world of right whale research. She’s best known for the decade she spent working almost single-handedly to shift Canadian shipping lanes out of right whale habitats — the first time in history that shipping lanes were amended for the sake of an endangered animal.

In all the time she has spent observing right whales, Brown’s only observations of them have been from the surface, on research boats or planes. Even for someone who has spent decades studying these animals, much of their lives remain a mystery. “Once they dive below the surface, your guess is as good as mine as to what is going on, and I’ve been doing it for 30 years,” Brown says.

Once a right whale dives, it can stay down for as long as 40 minutes and travel for kilometres underwater, making it difficult to predict where it will surface. Biologists have tried to use satellite tags to track animals, but these devices are much harder to attach to a large, moving animal, and are easily knocked off or damaged — this is particularly the case for right whales, which mate in jostling social groups that Brown compares to “dancing in a crowded discotech”.

The final, and perhaps the most daunting, challenge to studying whales is finding them. In the vastness of the ocean, spotting an animal that spends most of its life underwater requires calm waves and clear skies — and the ocean is not known for coordinating its moods with the needs of biologists.

Fortunately, in the early 2000s, a computer-savvy marine biologist was inspired to create a system that is changing all that.

Mark Baumgartner decided to search for whales with drones during a poker game. Every week, Baumgartner and Dave Fratantoni, a fellow researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), sat down over cards and hashed out the details of what they were working on. One night, after talking about Baumgartner’s work studying why baleen whales feed where they do, Fratantoni wondered aloud if his own expertise could help.

“Have you thought of doing marine mammal work with gliders?” he asked. Fratantoni was one of the early users of underwater Slocum gliders, which he used to collect oceanographic data like water temperature and salinity.

Baumgartner was intrigued. Slocum gliders could be a way to both listen to whales and collect the data he needed on water conditions. They could also stay at sea for three to four months at a time, supporting just the type of surveys Baumgartner wanted to conduct.