Patrick Stewart Made It So: How Captain Picard Helped Build a Whale-Snot Drone

4 min readThe late Sir Patrick Stewart brought the gravitas of the Royal Shakespeare Company to such iconic science fiction franchises as Star Trek, X-Men, and even Dune (the original 1984 film). But in the real world, the Yorkshire-born actor, who passed on October 28 at the age of 86, used his clout to advocate for the causes that meant something to him. He was candid about his own traumatic childhood, drawing on it to lead campaigns against domestic violence and post-traumatic stress disorder, and he advocated for the rescue and fostering of pit bulls. Yet, there’s one cause Patrick Stewart took on later in life that has a particularly poignant meaning for some Star Trek fans.In 2015, Sir Patrick Stewart spoke up for whale research.Most likely, if you say “Star Trek” and “whales,” your mind jumps to 1986’s Star Trek VI: The Voyage Home. In that comedically-minded Trek sequel, the cast of the original series (meaning the Kirk and Spock crew for the laymen out there) traveled through time to 1980s San Francisco to save a pair of humpback whales named George and Gracie and bring them to the future. But while Captain Kirk may have saved some whales on the silver screen, it was Captain Picard who spoke up for them in real life. More specifically, he spoke up for the collection of their snot.Note: Before you come at us, yes, we know about the whales in Cetacean Ops on Lower Decks and Prodigy. We’re Popular Mechanics, we know our Trek.“So, I had this idea of building a drone to collect biological information from whales and call it SnotBot,” Iain Kerr, CEO of Ocean Alliance, explained in a blog post. Collecting the mucus exhaled by whales is vitally important for marine mammal research, but conventional data collection methods can antagonize and disturb whales in the wild. Kerr took the idea to James Dowd, co-founder of Flying Car. His pitch was to fly a drone through the spray a whale exhales when it surfaces, collecting mucus on the way through and leaving the whale none the wiser. Dowd reportedly declared it a “brilliant” idea.Funding was another matter. Traditional sources proved a hard sell for such unconventional research, so Ocean Alliance turned to Kickstarter and the public instead. But a crowdfunding campaign only works if the crowd is paying attention.“Do you think having a celebrity like Sir Patrick Stewart would help…?” Kerr asked Dowd, who reportedly answered “Are you f***ing kidding me, absolutely!!” Sir Patrick was already a trustee of Ocean Alliance, as well as a personal friend of Kerr’s, so when the call came in, Stewart quickly agreed to help. Then it was just a question of how Stewart’s video appeal should go.Kerr's first instinct was the conventional approach: Stewart looks into the camera and makes an earnest plea. “My idea was Patrick Stewart would be on camera and say, ‘I want you to support this important work... that is important to whales, our oceans, etc.,’” Kerr recounted. “Boring! Thank heavens we went with Jim's idea: Let's harass Sir Patrick in the name of science.”The team flew to Sir Patrick’s Los Angeles home, where they filmed themselves antagonizing the Grammy-winning actor in the name of “collecting data.” Kerr then laid out what the campaign was actually for. The money wouldn’t just fund a single expedition, but three, to Patagonia, the Sea of Cortez, and Frederick Sound. Each outing would help refine the process, with the end goal of a SnotBot that any whale researcher could put to work.In the video’s final moments, Sir Patrick appealed directly to the cameras, imploring the audience to support the project, which would “give us answers to some of the mysteries about the ocean, and particularly whales.” Ocean Alliance later released an even longer video with Stewart and Kerr in which the CEO walked the film and TV star through the details of their SnotBot tech.The video took off. Kerr credits Stewart with getting the campaign “featured in TED, the NY Times, Forbes, People Magazine, etc and that bastion of science, Martha Stewart Living.” All that viral attention pushed the campaign past its $225,000 funding goal, raising a total of $229,819 from 1,739 backers (23 of whom donated the $250 that got them a signed copy of the Whales IMAX film, which was narrated by—who else—Sir Patrick Stewart).The SnotBot expeditions proved a success, and in the decade since that Kickstarter campaign, the drones’ work has expanded from mere snot collection to photogrammetric observation of whale body condition, disentangling whales from fishing lines, and starting in 2022, even tagging whales, which is a “game-changer” for whale research.Ocean Alliance knew the SnotBot could change the whale research landscape, if they could just get the funding. Sir Patrick Stewart, in true Captain Picard fashion, made it so.Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.