Yeah.

[laughs] And then there's a subgroup that is technically part of that population, but when the whales start heading north for the summer to feed, they don't go all the way north.

They stop right here in our backyard of the Pacific Northwest, um, which is both the coasts of the US and then also Canada.

Um, and they feed right here very close to shore all summer long.

There's estimated to be just over 200 of them, and that there's a hotspot for their foraging, their feeding, right off the coast of Newport, Oregon, which is the location conveniently of the Hatfield Marine Science Center from OSU.

Nice.

And so my PhD advisor, Lee Torres, sort of was like, "We have whales that come here every summer consistently extremely close to shore." There wasn't a big research project on them out of Hatfield at the time, and so she started up this long-term study in 2014, and just started collecting lots of data non-invasively, and that included repeated sampling with drones.

So filming the whales with the drone.