Saildrones and Snotbots in the Blue Anthropocene: Sensing technologies, multispecies intimacies, and scientific 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 unintentional participation in data collection. Building on ethnography, piloting experiments, interviews, and scrutiny of public blogs and scientific texts, this article documents two cases of drone oceanography, interrogates the multispecies intimacies they forge and considers what scientists return to marine animals in exchange for their biological data. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration directs ocean-surface Saildrones to follow northern fur seals in the Bering Sea, and Ocean Alliance, a not-for-profit research organization, collects microbes from cetaceans by flying aerial drones, or Snotbots, through their exhale. With the aim of generating more equitable reciprocities in waters that are surveyed by drones and increasingly challenging to live within, this article 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.

Drone sensing volumes

“…While this article presents one example, there are further stories to tell of drone sensing sensibilities. For example, writing of ‘drone oceanography’, Adam Fish (2022, p. 862, 863) highlights the reciprocal relationships between researchers, instruments (drones) and ‘the subjects they investigate’. Fish (2022, p. 862) argues that drones ‘improve the collection of biological data’ and aid with conservation ‘storytelling’.…”

“…For example, writing of ‘drone oceanography’, Adam Fish (2022, p. 862, 863) highlights the reciprocal relationships between researchers, instruments (drones) and ‘the subjects they investigate’. Fish (2022, p. 862) argues that drones ‘improve the collection of biological data’ and aid with conservation ‘storytelling’. Fish (2022, p. 863) also asserts that the relationships between multiple humans and non‐humans therein are ‘entangled’ and ‘mutually affect each other’.…”

“…Fish (2022, p. 862) argues that drones ‘improve the collection of biological data’ and aid with conservation ‘storytelling’. Fish (2022, p. 863) also asserts that the relationships between multiple humans and non‐humans therein are ‘entangled’ and ‘mutually affect each other’. Thus, while highlighting the drone's storytelling potential in an ‘era marked by existential urgencies’, so too is the importance of considering both ‘multispecies reciprocities’ and ‘intimacies’ asserted (Fish, 2022, p. 862).…”

“…Fish (2022, p. 863) also asserts that the relationships between multiple humans and non‐humans therein are ‘entangled’ and ‘mutually affect each other’. Thus, while highlighting the drone's storytelling potential in an ‘era marked by existential urgencies’, so too is the importance of considering both ‘multispecies reciprocities’ and ‘intimacies’ asserted (Fish, 2022, p. 862). While recognising that in Fish's (2022, p. 875) example the bodies of the marine wildlife are ‘instrumentalised’, so too does Fish remind us of the potential to tell other stories of these relations.…”

“…Just as Mike is impacted by those missing, so too does the sensor impact the very same, at once potentially revealing and altering the geographies of death, and impacting the ‘multi‐layered geographies of living with loss’ for the bereaved (Maddrell, 2016, p. 184). Here, the drone ‘entangles’ operator and victim, enabling particular forms of ‘intimate’ relations and ‘reciprocities’ (Fish, 2022, p. 867, 866). In other words, the dead continue to impact the lives of the living, and the drone's non‐human sensor acts to impact the dead.…”