Not only marine biologists study whales. There are in fact a few engineers in this field of research as well. I'm one of them. I think it is safe to say that most of us, if not all of us, have started to get involved with the animals because of a need of new research tools that would facilitate certain zoological studies. In the process of creating these tools, we have learned more and more about the animals and come up with more and more ideas to what other studies that are possible to do using the equipment we have built. This combination of engineering skills and the expertise of marine biologists has proven to be quite fruitful lately. Thanks to this interdisciplinary way of working we now know much more about the mysterious creatures that inhabits the oceans than we did before.

For example, how do you think we know anything about what sperm whales (or other deep diving whale species for that matter) do during their dives down to 200-2000 (!) m depths? A skilled scuba diver can follow them down to 30-40 m. If it wasn't for the measurement tags that can be attached to the whales using suction cups that releases after it is done recording, we would hardly know anything. Tags like that can record the entire movement path of the animal and record the sounds that they make during hunting. Very useful stuff!

My contribution to science has been related to bottlenose dolphins and their echolocation. I haven't been working with tags, but with more stationary research equipment designed to record the echolocation beam of dolphins in fine detail. More about that tomorrow. Until then, here is a photo of me and my measurement system on Roatán, Honduras, where I did parts of my experimental work as a PhD Student.