Reading a blue whale's health from its dive | Christy Judd, PhD student at KAUST

What is the first thing you do when you see a blue whale?

For Christy Judd, a PhD student at KAUST, the answer is: mark the location and start a timer.

From the moment a whale surfaces, the team is tracking the time between each breath cycle. A mother and calf were down for 10 to 14 minutes between dives.

Dive duration is a window into a whale's health: how efficiently it uses oxygen, how often it needs to surface, and whether its behaviour may be changing in response to activity around it.

Every second matters here. This is what blue whale research looks like up close.