Help Build the Next Generation of Whale Conservation Technology

Your support funds the design, build, and deployment of advanced, non-invasive tags that help scientists better understand whale health and behavior.

As climate change accelerates and human activity intensifies across the world’s oceans, whales and dolphins face mounting and often invisible stressors — from warming waters and shifting prey to underwater noise and vessel traffic. Yet we still lack the tools to directly measure how these pressures affect their health and physiology over time. Without that baseline understanding, conservation decisions risk being guided by assumption rather than evidence.

FaunaLabs was founded to change that. Building on pioneering work first developed during Dr. David Haas’s PhD research, we created the FaunaTag — a next-generation, non-invasive, suction-cup attached tag that integrates advanced health sensors — technology adapted from human wearables — with movement and acoustic data. After successful field testing of FaunaTag v2 on wild, free-swimming humpback whales in Brazil, we are now developing FaunaTag v3: a refined, more powerful platform designed for sustained deployment beginning in 2026.

With your support, we will complete the design, manufacture, and deployment of FaunaTag v3, enabling researchers to rigorously test these new health sensors and generate high-quality data on whale physiology, behavior, and acoustic ecology. The data generated will form the foundation for peer-reviewed science and long-term studies that help ensure conservation decisions are grounded in measurable evidence. The better we understand the health of individual whales and dolphins in real time, the better equipped we are to protect entire populations in a rapidly changing ocean.