Storying

Abstract

Drones or unpersonned vehicles are mobile sensing technologies that collapse space and enhance proximity between scientists and marine species. As such, they improve the collection of biological data—images, migration maps, and fluid samples, for example. But while the drone's benefits to oceanography are apparent, it is less clear what marine species receive for their participation in data collection. This chapter documents the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its use of ocean-surface Saildrones to follow northern fur seals in the Bering Sea. It interrogates the multispecies intimacies this drone oceanography forges and considers what scientists give to marine animals. This chapter offers storying, or the building of existential narratives that support conservation through public engagement, as a way of forging multispecies reciprocities in the Blue Anthropocene—an era marked by existential urgencies, technological materialities, and elemental constraints.