Patrick Stewart Promotes Local Effort To Collect Whale Snot Using Drones

GLOUCESTER (CBS) --  Sir Patrick Stewart is lending his celebrity to an important cause: Collecting whale snot via drones.

The "Star Trek" and "X-Men" actor appears in a new video promoting Ocean Alliance of Gloucester, an organization that is exploring ways to gather research samples from marine animals without harassing them.

Ocean Alliance has worked with Olin College of Engineering in Needham to develop "Snotbots." The drones fly into the spray clouds expelled from a whale's blowhole to gather mucus and other organic material that can teach scientists a lot about a whale's health.

The researchers say drones are a more humane method to study whales, instead of current tactics that involve chasing down a whale in a motor boat and hitting it with a biopsy dart.

"If all your doctor knew about your health was from chasing you around the examination room, blasting an airhorn and jabbing you with a needle, wouldn't your chart would reflect that?" says Ocean Alliance CEO Iain Kerr in a statement. "Snotbot is designed to remove that aspect of the research process."

The video shows Stewart being "harassed" in his own home by researchers. Stewart says he supports the drone project as a way to "give us answers to some of the mysteries about the ocean and particularly, whales."

Ocean Alliance has launched a Kickstarter aiming to raise $225,000 for the drone research.

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