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A new wave of technology is transforming the way scientists understand the natural world, decoding animal behavior and delivering real time data from the world's most remote places.
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Places like the El Biscayano Biosphere Reserve, located on the Baja California peninsula in Mexico, the largest Wildlife Refuge in Latin America.
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It's a land of dramatic contrasts, where rugged desert spills into the turquoise water of the Pacific Ocean and one of only three places on Earth where eastern Pacific gray whales come to give birth.
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Researchers here have studied these whales for decades, and the latest technology is offering unprecedented insight into their lives.
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You know, the thing about this biosphere is we have to have a special permit to do what we're doing.
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Today.
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I've teamed up with videographer Carlos Gauna.
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During the winter breeding season, we've been granted rare access to the lagoon's restricted research zone to meet a team of field biologists at work.
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Hey, are you all the research team we're looking for?
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Yes, I think so.
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Great.
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Earlier this morning, this team pole mounted a suction cup tag directly onto a gray whale cab.
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They're out here now.
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We're covering the tag so they can download its data.
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Hey, I'm Ray.
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I'm Will.
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Will Cameron.
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Nice to meet you all.
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So this is a customized animal tracking solutions tag.
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And so it has a whole bunch of sensors, accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensor to get to depth.
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There's a light sensor, a temperature sensor.
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It has a camera.
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You can see here that we have a hydrophone to get you high resolution, really fine scale data on what the animals doing on the water.
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We've been using mainly 2-to-3-hour release timers, so they're pretty short deployments.
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That'll help you understand what quantity of food they need in a given ecosystem and you can measure whether that ecosystem is matching it or not.
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Yes, exactly.
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Doctor Swartz We all headed back to shore where I met Doctor Steven Swartz, head of the Sun Ignacio Gray Whale Field Station.
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So I'm so impressed when I get to bring Wild Kingdom to places like this.
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We see the tents that the grad students are sleeping in.
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We see the bare bones nature of the facilities.
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And yet This site is probably one of the most important sites in terms of conservation for gray whales.
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Oh, we certainly wouldn't know nearly as much as we do now because of this facility.
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It takes a special person though to live in close quarters and these types of surroundings.
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You know this is where the magic happens.
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This is our field station established in 2006.
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Sorry to interrupt everyone's hard work.
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Hey there, I had the unique privilege to go desk by desk to see the research firsthand.
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One grad student was comparing whale photos from the 70s to present day whales.
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Another was studying drone video to evaluate the body condition of this season's whales.
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We meet again, and I reconnected with Will and his team.
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They were reviewing the data from the suction cup tag they collected this morning.
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So what we're really hoping for is the tags on the cap to be facing forward so we can see when they're suckling, to try to get a sense for how often they're nursing, how much energy they're taking in.
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Every little glimpse into the world of the gray whales provides information that researchers can use for conservation.
