Scientists are learning the potential for drones extends beyond missile launches or pizza deliveries to more edifying endeavours – such as collecting whale mucus.

Vanessa Pirotta, a researcher from Macquarie University, was keen to discover a less dangerous way of accessing exhalations from a whale's blowhole than previous methods, such as manoeuvring a nylon stocking at the end of a very long pole.

An alternative was to extract the mucus from a beached whale – or one deliberately killed. The former, though, involved animals possibly compromised by ill-health, while the latter was, to Ms Pirotta, "not desirable in the modern era".

Drones offered a relatively low-cost device that could be modified to be water-proofed and to deploy a "flip-lid" to capture and store samples from whales as they ejected air through their blowhole, according to research published late last month in the Frontiers in Marine Science journal.