00:00The Antarctic feeding grounds beckon whales as they migrate off WA's coast.
00:09Humpback parents guide their newborns on their maiden voyage south, while pods of pygmy blue
00:14whales glide off Dunsborough.
00:18And whale researchers are springing into action.
00:21Are we good to go?
00:22Good to go.
00:23Alright, let's go.
00:24The team is heading out to tag blue whales before they round the cape into deeper water.
00:29Going up.
00:30A drone is deployed to scout, and within seconds, a surfacing whale is spotted.
00:35Coming up.
00:36But as soon as they're more than a few metres below the surface, they just disappear.
00:40It's quite incredible how quickly these animals just vanish.
00:43At up to $10,000 a tag, all eyes remain peeled to seize every opportunity.
00:49We try very, very hard not to miss.
00:51So far we've deployed three this season, we're hoping to get another one on, which would
00:55be really good, so that would be four for the season, which is a really, really good
00:59outcome.
01:00There's no certainty how long the tag will stay in place.
01:02They last anywhere from a couple of weeks up to, if you're lucky, maybe 12 months.
01:06A whale sheds skin really, really fast, so as they shed skin, they shed the tag out.
01:11The tags emit a signal when a whale surfaces, allowing researchers and the public to track
01:16the animals online as they migrate towards their summer feeding grounds around the Bonney
01:22Upwelling off the coast of southeastern Australia.
01:25They're incredibly hard to study.
01:26For something that is so big, they are incredibly stealthy.
01:31We're starting to understand a bit better, but I think there's a lot of things that we
01:34thought we were sure about, that the more information we get, we're starting to understand
01:37that maybe that's not the case.
01:40Slowly revealing their hidden lives of these gentle giants of the ocean.
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