Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa tagged 22 humpback whales off Maui this year by flying the tags onto their backs with drones, replacing a method that required driving a boat within arm’s reach of a 40-ton animal. The Marine Mammal Research Program deployed the suction-cup tags during its February 2026 field season on lactating females, a calf, and adult males. The team worked from several hundred yards away, far enough that the whales showed no reaction to the aircraft.
The old way involved a seven-meter (23-foot) carbon fiber pole, a boat, and a slow approach that changed the behavior researchers came to measure.
The Pole Method Disturbed The Animal It Was Measuring
Tagging a whale traditionally means putting a vessel alongside a surfacing animal and reaching out with a pole long enough to press a suction-cup tag onto its back. It works. It also means the whale gets a boat in its personal space at the exact moment scientists want a baseline reading of undisturbed behavior.
Lars Bejder, who directs the Marine Mammal Research Program at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, described the shift in blunt terms. “It’s a complete game changer,” he said. “We’re putting less pressure on the animals. We don’t have to get close to them.”
The second half of that statement carries more weight than the first. Bejder said the drones let his team tag whales they previously could not approach at all, which changes the sample, not just the method. Animals that fled from boats were, by definition, missing from years of tagging data.
The Tags Record Movement And Energy, Not Just Position
The team deployed Customized Animal Tracking Solutions accelerometer tags, known in the field as CATS tags. These are biologging devices that record fine-scale movement and energy expenditure, attached with suction cups so they release on their own and float for recovery.
That distinction matters for what the data can answer. A satellite tag tells you where a whale went. An accelerometer tag tells you what it did, how hard it worked to do it, and how much energy the effort cost. Apply that to a lactating female and you can start calculating whether a mother has the reserves to finish a migration.
One deployment in particular would have been impossible from a boat. The team tagged a skittish singing male during its final surfacing bout, catching an animal that would have dived long before a vessel closed the distance.
Ph.D. student Lewis Evans put the operational advantage plainly in the program’s season recap: using drones to deploy tags lets the team be far more selective about which animal gets tagged.
The Season Numbers Are Bigger Than The Tag Count
The tagging is one piece of an eighth consecutive year of fieldwork. HIMB’s own recap of the 2026 Maui season counts 48 days on the water and more than 1,500 drone-based body condition measurements, the aerial photogrammetry that lets researchers judge whether a whale is fat, thin, or pregnant without touching it.
Those measurements feed a health database that now holds roughly 14,000 measurements from about 8,500 individual whales. One animal, catalogued as Arpeggio, has been measured 21 times since 2019.
Worth flagging for anyone citing the tag count: the university’s August 2 announcement puts the figure at 22 drone-deployed tags, while HIMB’s season recap counts 24 biologging deployments for the season overall. The two numbers are not necessarily in conflict, since the season total may include tags placed by other means, but they are not interchangeable either.
The weather did not cooperate. March brought 51 inches (130 cm) of rain to parts of Maui and the flooding that came with it, and the team worked the clear windows between Kona lows.
Navy Money Is Funding The Whale Research
The work is paid for by the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Navy’s Living Marine Resources program, Dolphin Quest, and private donors.
That funding line is not incidental. The stated purpose of the data includes understanding how whales respond to environmental stressors, and the university lists vessel traffic and military activity alongside climate events on that list. The Navy is funding research into how its own operations affect the animals, which is both a reasonable use of Living Marine Resources money and a detail most coverage of this announcement left out.
DroneXL’s Take
This is now a method, not an experiment.
DroneXL has been tracking drone-based tagging for four years, and the arc is clear. In 2022 we covered Ocean Alliance moving from SnotBot to drone-deployed tags, the same team that had been flying modified DJI Inspire airframes through whale blows to collect DNA and hormone samples. Last August we covered Project CETI’s tap-and-go tagging off Dominica, where FPV drones pressed acoustic tags onto sperm whales and succeeded in more than half of 20 attempts. In April, Harvard students built a fixed-wing VTOL to track those same sperm whales.
Twenty-two tags in a single season on a program running its eighth year is a different category of result. This is not a proof of concept anymore. It is a field season.
The gap in the announcement is hardware. Neither the university release nor the news coverage names the aircraft or the deployment mechanism, which is the one detail every operator reading this wants. CETI published its rig. Ocean Alliance published its tag holder design. Hawaii has not, at least not yet.
There is a harder question underneath the technology, and our December 2024 coverage of drone surveys showing humpback decline framed it. Better instruments have consistently returned worse news about these populations. Non-invasive tagging will produce cleaner data on how whales respond to ships, sonar, and warming water. Whether the institutions funding that data act on what it says is a separate matter, and one no drone can solve.
Sources: University of Hawaii News, Hawaii News Now, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Maui News
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Rafael Suárez.
