Dr. Ian Kerr, CEO of a conservation group called Ocean Alliance, is helping conservationists to build a fleet of drones to collect whale snot. The organization has been long making efforts to protect and research whales for decades.

In order to get the best data and details about the whales, Ocean Alliance has developed a special set of drones called Snotbots. These are a custom-built drones created in partnership with Olin College of Engineering.

Explaining the working of the drones, Ocean Alliance said in a statement that these special drones will hover in the air above a surfacing whale and collect the snot exhaled from its lungs.

After collecting the snot sample, the drone will return the sample to researchers, who will further analyze it to retrieve a wealth of biological data.

Researchers said they are making these difficult efforts to collect whale snot because the snot is the only thing which can help them check the animal's hormone levels, which provide useful information on the whale's reproductive cycles, as well as the stress levels they experience as a result of increased human activity in the oceans.

Ocean Alliance said that it is hoping to raise $225,000 in funds over the course of the next month, and if it can meet its goal before August 25, then it'll have enough funding to launch three SnotBot-fueled expeditions.

The standard way of getting data samples from whales living in wild involves chasing them with a loud motorboat and subsequently shooting them in the back with a sampling dart from a crossbow.

This method puts the whales under a great deal of stress, which skews the data that scientists gather from them.