A conservation group called Ocean Alliance has turned out to Kickstarter to raise funds to implements its plan to collect biological data about whales so that they could protect the species.

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.