This week's episode of Life With Strings Attached was filmed on location in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Richard Sears is a Franco-American who founded the Mingan Island Cetacean Study in 1979 to study marine mammals in the Saint Lawrence, with an emphasis on baleen whales. He worked with and learned from the pioneers of whale research. From them, he learned that to know whales, there is no better place than to spend a lot of time at sea. The work, initiated in 1979, became the first long-term blue whale research project on the planet, and the longest continuous data collection effort of cetaceans in the Saint Lawrence. He started the first long term study of blue whales in the Sea of Cortez, collected the first blue whale identification photographs and biopsies off western Iceland, and collected data on blue whales passing by the archipelago near the Azores, with which he's contributed to a catalog of more than 800 blue whales from the northeast Atlantic. In addition, he's worked in Georgia, Panama, Costa Rica, New Caledonia, Greenland, Baffin Island, and the Mediterranean – a truly global impact today. Richard continues to be involved in blue whale research in the North Atlantic, where his main interest lies in the distribution, movements and habits of blue whales. In the Saint Lawrence, his main interest focuses on blue and fin whale social interactions and habitat use. He says his greatest frustration is the water's surface and the visibility beneath. Sears is also a lifelong guitar player and music lover, and collaborated with Nik Huber on the limited Blue Whale series. I wanted to get a better understanding of his work, hear his perspective on whale behaviour and animal consciousness, and draw some connections between his work and the world of music. I very much enjoyed my conversation with Richard, and I hope that you do too.