Experimental Simulation of Dolphin Blow

Marine mammals face increasing threats from human activities and other anthropogenic impacts such as pollution. To assess stress and heath in wild dolphins, pods can be tracked by boat and unmanned aircraft to analyze surfacing rates as an indicator of stress as well as physiological measures taken from blowhole mucus. While hormone samples have been taken from the blowhole exultations in whales with both poles and unmanned aircraft, dolphins are much less likely to remain close enough to boats to acquire samples in the former method. Remote technology represents the best potential tool for the non-invasive collection of critical measures of health including stress and reproductive hormones and parasite loads. In order to evaluate requirements, experimental simulators have been developed to model the dolphin blow flow field to evaluate the collection performance of unmanned aircraft. Two operational systems are compared with expected jet exit characteristics, including flow rates, jet velocities, and mucus entrainment. The resulting flow fields are evaluated and compared with in vivo observations.