By the Argos Team

How a Childhood Encounter Inspired a Marine Biologist

In the sheltered bays of Península Valdés, on the Atlantic coast of Argentina, a southern right whale rolls at the surface and vents a plume of mist into the cold air. For a few seconds it is visible. Then it slips under and is gone, bound for feeding grounds that were, for generations, a mystery. For most of human history, that was where the story ended, a whale seen, then swallowed by the sea. For Alex Zerbini, it is where the work begins.

Following whales past that horizon, and bringing back a record of what they do out of sight, has carried him to nearly every ocean. But the impulse behind it traces to a different beach, an ocean away and decades earlier: a stretch of sand in Brazil, and a dolphin that should not have been there.

He was nine. He was walking the sand with his father and brother on a summer holiday when he came across the animal, tangled in a fisherman’s net. He went over and asked the man what he intended to do with it. Cut it up, the fisherman told him, and feed the meat to the dogs, they didn’t eat dolphins here. Something in the boy locked into place. “I need to understand more,” he remembers thinking. “I need to know more.” By his parents’ account he had been talking about becoming a marine biologist since he was three or four. He simply never stopped.

Tracking Whales Across the World’s Oceans

Today Zerbini is one of the world’s leading authorities on tracking large whales by satellite, with appointments spanning the University of Washington’s Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies, NOAA’s Marine Mammal Laboratory, and the nonprofits Marine Ecology and Telemetry Research and instituto Aqualie. He has worked with the Argos system for about 25 years. And he has spent much of that time chasing a deceptively simple question: what do whales actually do when no one is watching, and how do we keep them safe once we know?

There is no single lab, no single field season. Zerbini works with teams scattered across the globe, and his own calendar reads like a migration route. In a single stretch of 2026 he ran a project in Argentina in May, tagged humpback and fin whales off New Jersey with collaborators from Rutgers University, and was two weeks out from a research cruise for killer whales in the Gulf of Alaska, with a major right-whale campaign in Argentina waiting in September and ongoing work in South Africa with the University of Pretoria. “I’m all over the world tagging and collaborating with people,” he said.

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