 I work on whales. The interesting whale at the moment is a white whale called Migaloo who's named from Australia. He's travelling from his feeding ground in Antarctica to his breeding ground in the tropics somewhere and so whales passing New Zealand in the winter time heading north they're going to New Caledonia or Australia and he's an Australian coming via New Zealand. We're really interested in the recovery of humpback whales. They were almost made extinct during the whaling era and they're slowly recovering and so we're interested in how they move around in the South Pacific region. We're interested in staying humpbacks in particular because they were almost wiped out post whaling so the whaling era was a devastating time for them and in New Zealand we lost a lot of whales almost all of them and so now they're recovering from this time we're interested in where they're going to where they're coming from and how the numbers are increasing so we do that using a bunch of different tools to understand this. The most interesting thing we've learned is that you can age whales from their DNA so using genetics those same tissue samples that we know each individual whale and where they're going we can actually now use to age them and so there's no way of of aging a whale it's always been real challenge we could do it when they were dead which is not ideal it doesn't work so using a little bit of skin and some fancy techniques we can actually find out now the age of whales which means we're able to say how long they live what age they have calves whether there's you know they're dying at a certain age younger or older males females so that's it's a really exciting advancement in our understanding of whales.