An AI-Powered Robot and Gaming Are Helping Scientists Identify New Deep-Sea Species
January 30th, 2025
Via Bloomberg, an article on how an AI-powered robot and gaming are helping scientists identify new deep-sea species: Nearly a dozen miles off the California coast on a foggy October morning, a crane lifts a boxy yellow robot off the deck of the research vessel Rachel Carson and lowers it into Monterey Bay’s choppy gunmetal-gray waters. The […]
Read More »Will Open Source Data and AI Help The Oceans Survive?
September 16th, 2024
Via USA Today, a look at how open-source data and AI can help the world’s oceans survive a record-breaking year of heat: Approximately one in four marine life creatures live in coral reefs. Commonly mistaken for plants, corals are critical animals that provide aquatic species with the food, shelter, and breeding grounds necessary for sustaining biodiversity. As […]
Read More »Sea Lions Equipped with Cameras Help Uncover Uncharted Ocean Habitats
August 14th, 2024
Via Terra Daily, a look at how tech-enabled sea lions are helping uncover ocean habitats: The world’s seabeds remain largely unexplored, with current knowledge being inconsistent. Utilizing remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) to study seabeds can be costly, dependent on weather conditions, and challenging in deep, remote areas.To address these obstacles, Australian researchers have turned […]
Read More »Diving With Penguins: Tech Gives Ocean Scientists a Bird’s-Eye View of Foraging in Antarctic Waters
July 15th, 2024
Via The Conversation, a look at how technology is being used to give ocean scientists a bird’s-eye view of foraging in Antarctic waters: Chinstrap penguins are members of Antarctica’s brush-tailed group of penguins. They’re easily identified by the feature that gives them their name – a black strap that runs from ear to ear below the […]
Read More »Saving The Whales, With Technology
April 12th, 2024
Via The Economist, a look at how new technology can keep whales safe from speeding ships:
On march 3rd a whale calf washed ashore in Georgia, on America’s east coast, bearing slash marks characteristic of a ship’s propeller. Less than a month later another whale, a recent mother, was found floating off the coast of Virginia. Her back was broken from the blunt-force trauma of a ship collision; her calf, missing and still meant to be nursing, is not expected to live. Three deaths within weeks is not good news for the North Atlantic right whales, of which only about 360 remain.
They are dying mainly because of human activity, and they are not alone. Ship collisions threaten whale populations worldwide, killing up to 20,000 individuals annually. With global ocean traffic forecast to rise by at least 240% by 2050, the problem will balloon. But a new movement is using technology to fight back. On April 11th a Californian strike-prevention programme expanded operations across North American waters. Other countries are following suit.
Whale Safe launched in 2020, two years after the number of whales killed by collisions in California reached a record high of 14. Callie Leiphardt, the scientist leading the project at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, says that for every killed whale found, ten more are thought to die unrecorded. That so many were dying despite voluntary speed limits suggested more robust interventions were needed. The team reasoned that by alerting ships to whales, and publicising which shipping companies ignored the speed limit, they might increase compliance and bring down deaths.
Their approach rests on listening for whales underwater using microphone-equipped buoys capable of separating low-frequency whale calls from the ocean’s background noise. Vetted detections are then fed into Whale Safe’s alert tool, alongside sightings and model-based predictions, to tell nearby skippers to slow down. The team then monitors ships’ speeds within established slow zones via a widespread gps-tracking system and awards parent companies marks from a to f, visible online. With this week’s expansion to the east coast, Whale Safe will now assess companies across all slow-speed zones in North America.
How many whales have been saved is hard to say. But since Whale Safe first launched, Californian collisions seem to be decreasing: only four were reported in 2022, compared with 11 the year before. In the Santa Barbara channel, a collision hotspot, the proportion of ships that slow down has also been rising—from 46% in 2019 to 63.5% in 2023.
The idea is also catching on elsewhere. In 2022 Chile moored its first acoustic buoy to alert ships to blue, sei, humpback and southern-right whales. That same year Greek researchers published the results of a trial using buoys to detect sperm whales in the Mediterranean and to pinpoint their location in three dimensions, informed by work on the black boxes of lost planes. Another European project, led by a consortium of ngos and naval companies, is developing detection boxes that use thermal and infrared cameras, alongside other sensors, to help ships spot whales early.
For Mark Baumgartner at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who pioneered the use of acoustic buoys, the real solution lies in changing ships’ behaviour. After all, spotting a whale is useful only if the ship is moving slowly enough to react. This is why Canada has expanded mandatory speed restrictions to ever more areas where right whales live; America is considering doing the same. The International Maritime Organisation, a un agency, created a “Particularly Sensitive Sea Area” in the north-western Mediterranean last summer, the first such area explicitly created to mitigate ship strikes. Several companies are now rerouting ships away from sperm-whale habitats there. Similar efforts are under way in Sri Lanka and New Zealand.
It will not all be plain sailing. Some overlap between ships and whales is inevitable in busy ports. What’s more, slow container ships can still kill whales, as can smaller boats. Many coastal communities, whose economies rely on their ports and harbours, often resist stricter measures, such as mandatory speed limits or no-go areas. With all that in mind, it is easy to feel pessimistic on behalf of a species like the North Atlantic right whale. But like all whales that used to be hunted for meat and blubber, it has bounced back from the brink of extinction before. According to Dr Baumgartner, “Everyone that works on right whales has hope.”
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Get Ready for the Robotic Fish Revolution
March 26th, 2024Via Hakai Magazine, a look at how swarms of robotic fish could soon make traditional underwater research vehicles obsolete:
Human technology has long drawn inspiration from the natural world: The first airplanes were modeled after birds. The designer of Velcro was inspired by the irksome burrs he often had to pick off his dog. And in recent years, engineers eager to explore the world’s oceans have been taking cues from the creatures that do it best: fish.
Around the world, researchers developing robots that look and swim like fish say their aquatic automatons are cheaper, easier to use, and less disruptive to sea life than the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) scientists use today. In a recent review of the technology’s advances, scientists claim only a few technical problems stand in the way of a robotic fish revolution.
Over the past few decades, engineers have designed prototype robotic fish for a variety of purposes. While some are built to carry out specific tasks—such as tricking other fish in a lab, simulating fish hydrodynamics, or gathering plastics from the ocean—the majority are designed to traverse the seas while collecting data. These robotic explorers are typically equipped with video cameras to document any life forms they encounter and sensors to measure depth, temperature, and acidity. Some of these machines—including a robotic catfish named Charlie, developed by the CIA—can even take and store water samples.
While modern ROVs can already do all these tasks and more, the review’s authors argue that robotic fish will be the tools of the future.
“The jobs done by existing [ROVs] can be done by robotic fish,” says Weicheng Cui, a marine engineer at Westlake University in China and a coauthor of the review. And “what cannot be done by existing ROVs may [also] be done by robotic fish.”
Since the invention of the first tethered ROV in 1953—a contraption named Poodle—scientists have increasingly relied on ROVs to help them reach parts of the ocean that are too deep or dangerous for scuba divers. ROVs can go to depths that divers can’t reach, spend a virtually unlimited amount of time there, and bring back specimens, both living and not, from their trips.
While ROVs have been a boon for science, most models are large and expensive. The ROVs used by scientific organizations, such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and OceanX, can weigh nearly as much as a rhinoceros and cost millions of dollars. Such large, high-end ROVs also require a crane to deploy and must be tethered to a mother ship while in the water.
Robot fish have been designed to accomplish all sorts of tasks. This one, named Charlie, was built by the CIA to surreptitiously collect water samples. Photo by World Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
In contrast, robotic fish are battery-powered bots that typically weigh only a few kilograms and cost a couple thousand dollars. Although some have been designed to resemble real fish, robotic fish typically come in neutral colors and resemble their biological counterparts in shape only. Yet, according to Tsam Lung You, an engineer at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the review, even the most unrealistic robot fish are less disruptive to aquatic life than the average ROV.
Unlike most ROVs that use propellers to get around, robotic fish swim like the animals that inspired them. Flexing their tails back and forth, robotic fish glide through the water quietly and don’t seem to disturb the surrounding marine life—an advantage for researchers looking to study underwater organisms in their natural environments.
Because robotic fish are small and stealthy, scientists may be able to use them to observe sensitive species or venture into the nooks and crannies of coral reefs, lava tubes, and undersea caves. Although robotic fish are highly maneuverable, current models have one big downside: their range is very limited. With no mother ship to supply them with power and limited room to hold batteries, today’s robotic fish can only spend a few hours in the water at a time.
For robotic fish to make modern ROVs obsolete, they’ll need a key piece that’s currently missing: a docking station where they can autonomously recharge their batteries. Cui envisions a future where schools of small robotic fish work together to accomplish big tasks and take turns docking at underwater charging stations powered by a renewable energy source, like wave power.
“Instead of one [ROV], we can use many robotic fish,” Cui says. “This will greatly increase the efficiency of deep-sea operations.”
This potential future relies on the development of autonomous underwater charging stations, but Cui and his colleagues believe these can be built using existing technologies. The potential docking station’s core, he says, would likely be a wireless charging system. Cui says this fishy future could come to fruition in under a decade if the demand is great enough.
Still, getting scientists to trade in their ROVs for schools of robotic fish may be a tough sell, says Paul Clarkson, the director of husbandry operations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.
“For decades, we’ve benefited from using the remotely operated vehicles designed and operated by our research and technology partner, MBARI,” says Clarkson. “Their ROVs are an essential part of our work and research, and the capabilities they provide make them an irreplaceable tool.”
That said, he adds, “with the threats of climate change, habitat destruction, overfishing, and plastic pollution, we need to consider what advantages new innovations may offer in understanding our changing world.”
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