Late last year, UrgentSeas received an anonymous tip from a former employee at the Miami Seaquarium about animal tanks away from public view. The advocacy group went to investigate.
In November, the group posted a short clip of what it found by flying a drone over the property: an elderly manatee living alone in a decaying private pool. Within a month, the clip had been watched millions of times and the outcry had grown so intense that the US Fish and Wildlife Service moved the manatee, Romeo, to a sanctuary.
Over the past decade, drones have become irreplaceable tools in activist and conservation circles. In 2013, the animal rights group
