Abstract
Drones have become popular with the general public for viewing and filming marine life. One amateur enthusiast platform, DroneSharkApp, films marine life in the waters off Sydney, Australia year-round and posts their observations on social media. The drone observations include the behaviours of a variety of coastal marine wildlife species, including sharks, rays, fur seals, dolphins and fish, as well as migratory species such as migrating humpback whales. Given the extensive effort and multiple recordings of the presence, behaviour and interactions of various species with humans provided by DroneSharkApp, we explored its utility for providing biologically meaningful observations of marine wildlife. Using social media posts from the DroneSharkApp Instagram page, a total of 678 wildlife videos were assessed from 432 days of observation collected by a single observer. This included 94 feeding behaviours or events for fur seals (n = 58) and dolphins (n = 33), two feeding events for white sharks and one feeding event for a humpback whale. DroneSharkApp documented 101 interactions with sharks and humans (swimmers and surfers), demonstrating the frequent, mainly innocuous human–shark overlap off some of Australia’s busiest beaches. Finally, DroneSharkApp provided multiple observations of humpback and dwarf minke whales with calves travelling north, indicating calving occurring well south of traditional northern Queensland breeding waters. Collaboration between scientists and citizen scientists such as those involved with DroneSharkApp can greatly and quantitatively increase the biological understanding of marine wildlife data.
Highlights
The use of drones in wildlife research has enabled the collection of new information via readily accessible technologies [1]
Drones have replaced the need for close vessel approaches or vessels completely, e.g., when researching whales [4], and have enabled research to be conducted from the shore, e.g., in white shark research [5]
Drones have been proven to be versatile tools for collecting animal morphometrics information relating to Australian sea lion size [6], dolphin pregnancy [7], lung microbiota or viruses in humpback whales [4,8], species abundance in sea turtles [2], species distribution [9], density in jelly fish [10], behaviour in leopard seal predation [11] and sting ray behaviour and habitat use [12]
Summary
The use of drones in wildlife research has enabled the collection of new information via readily accessible technologies [1]. Drones have been proven to be versatile tools for collecting animal morphometrics information relating to Australian sea lion size [6], dolphin pregnancy [7], lung microbiota or viruses in humpback whales [4,8], species abundance in sea turtles [2], species distribution [9], density in jelly fish [10], behaviour in leopard seal predation [11] and sting ray behaviour and habitat use [12]. Despite several challenges, such as limitations in terms of flight time, range and weather-dependent flying (e.g., low wind and little rain), drones offer multiple opportunities to collect observations that were not previously possible. Scientists have been investigating potential applications using observations from such platforms to learn more about marine life
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