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 »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 »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 »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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The Race To Build Climate-Resilient Reefs
January 30th, 2024Via BBC, a look at novel restoration methods that can speed up the recovery of threatened corals – but for a lasting impact, they need to be backed by action to stop ocean warming:
A new ally may help speed up the race to restore devastated coral reefs in Australia: robots, combined with mass-manufacturing techniques. Around the world, scientists are also working on other methods to help reefs recover faster and on a larger scale than before. But as corals face existential threats, including a steady increase in the intensity and duration of marine heat waves, experts warn that these solutions need to go hand in hand with action on global warming if they are to bring lasting improvements.
Taryn Foster is a coral scientist based in Western Australia and chief executive of Coral Maker, which produces small coral skeletons onto which nursery grown coral is attached. She was spurred into action by the mass bleaching she witnessed while doing research for her doctoral thesis on climate impacts on coral reefs.
“I was studying these big reefs and saw how quickly a bleaching event devastates a reef system,” says Foster. “In the space of a few weeks during one of the bleaching events, we saw around 90% coral mortality. And I was reconsidering whether or not I wanted to continue to write scientific research papers, or whether I wanted to get more involved in practical, more solutions-based work.”
The ocean absorbs 90% of the heat caused by human-driven climate change. Warming oceans are a huge problem for coral reefs as they require temperatures to stay within the range of 79-84F (26.1-28.8C) to remain healthy, grow, and reproduce. Current predictions estimate that 99% of coral could succumb to marine heatwaves by the 2030s if global temperatures continue to rise at the current rate.
This would have dramatic consequences not just for corals, but for the wider reef ecosystem. Although coral reefs only occupy 0.1% of the seafloor, 25% of all named marine species live in reef systems and an estimated one billion people benefit directly or indirectly from coral reefs. Coral ecosystems face a host of threats ranging from increasing ocean acidification to a rise in coral diseases but the steady and alarming increase in ocean surface temperatures poses the most ubiquitous and ominous problem.
Coral restoration typically involves transplanting nursery-grown coral onto the damaged reef by hand using individual divers, a very time consuming and arduous process that can be expensive and hard to do on a large scale. Foster decided that a new approach was needed to scale up coral planting, incorporating lessons from her family’s manufacturing business, such as automation and mass production.
“I was thinking we can apply some of these technologies to coral reef restoration,” says Foster. “There’s lots of parts of the process that are just pick and place, repetitive type tasks which are ideally suited to robotic automation.”
She partnered with software company Autodesk, which helped her implement automation and artificial intelligence into a process that could manufacture skeletons for coral. Foster says using artificial intelligence to program and run the robotic side of the operation allows for greater flexibily and accuracy.
“Unlike standard pre-programmed robotic systems, artificial intelligence is able to respond to the variability in coral morphology and adjust robotic movements accordingly,” says Foster.
To create corals for planting, robots work alongside humans, attaching nursery-grown coral fragments to mass-produced coral skeletons on an assembly line. The material used for the coral skeletons is rock or cement; currently Coral Maker uses recycled construction rubble.
Foster says current restoration programmes can generally restore about 2.5 acres (1 hectare) of coral reef in a year, but that once Coral Maker is fully operational it could restore around 250 acres (100 hectares) a year.
A race is also underway in the US, to save the bleached corals of the Flordia Keys Reef Tract. Florida’s coral reef system, which is the third largest in the world, is under severe threat. Now, a novel approach is boosting the survival chances of two of its primary reef-building coral species, both of which are endangered: the pale brown, pointed-antler-like staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) and the flattened-antler-like elkhorn (Acropora palmata). Both the staghorn and the elkhorn have been devastated by disease and climate change, and have seen a 97% decline in their population since the 1970s. The Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF), the world’s largest reef restoration organisation, was formed in 2005 in response to this population crash.
CRF operates coral nurseries in the ocean that grow juvenile coral, which are then transplanted to reef restoration sites in an effort to stave off the extinction of coral species and restore balance to the reef ecosystems. The corals are grown on floating, anchored trees made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) with fibreglass branches onto which coral fragments are attached with thin plastic lines. This structure allows them to grow particularly fast, says Phanor Montoya-Maya, CRF’s restoration programme manager. This is because the suspended corals are surrounded by light and waterborne nutrition and are more protected from storms and other disturbances than they would be if they were anchored to the sea floor. According to Montoya-Maya, the corals are “reef-ready” in six to nine months.
CRF’s Tavernier Coral Tree Nursery in the Florida Keys covers 1.5 acres (6,070 sq m) of ocean floor, contains more than 500 coral trees, and is capable of producing 40,000 reef-ready corals every year, the organisation says.
Even restored reefs still face the threat of global warming, however. In July 2023, a marine heat wave in Florida caused ocean temperatures to soar: in some areas ocean temperatures exceeded hot tub levels of 100F (37.7C). The bleaching threshold for coral is typically around 87F (30.5C). When water temperatures cross that red line and stay that way for a month or more, coral is stressed to such a degree that it has to expel the algae (zooxanthellae) in its tissues. This algae gives coral both its distinctive color and, in a unique symbiotic relationship, it also feeds vital nutrients to its coral host. Bleached coral can survive and eventually recover, but any recovery requires water temperatures to revert back to a less extreme range and stay that way. This past summer in Florida the heat was so extreme that in some instances the coral tissue began to dissolve, eliminating any prospect of recovery, according to CRF.
In response to the marine heat wave in July, CRF enacted an emergency plan to remove their coral trees from the nurseries and move them to land-based aquariums where the water is kept at cooler temperatures. Even with the rescue operation, CRF lost about 50% of its coral stock in its four coral tree nurseries. Much of what remains is bleached, making its recovery uncertain, CRF says.
Montoya-Maya says that CRF’s research shows a complicated picture of how individual corals respond to temperature increases.
“CRF’s research has revealed the importance of genetic diversity in coral populations,” says Montoya-Maya. “However, we have found that these responses also vary depending on specific locations and environmental conditions – no genotype displays the same responses across different locations.”
99% of coral could succumb to marine heatwaves by 2030 if global temperatures continue to rise at the current rate
Researchers at Australia’s tropical marine research agency, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), are trying to make juvenile coral more heat-resilient by identifying and selectively breeding heat-tolerant adults and inoculating corals with heat-resilient symbiotic microalgae.“Results so far are encouraging and there is potential to increase the heat tolerance of corals to improve survival in hotter seas,” says AIMS researcher Saskia Jurriaans. “But we need to do this at scale and out of the lab in cost-effective ways.”
CARBON COUNT
The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.Some multinational corporations have also decided to invest in reef restoration. In 2019 the cat food brand Sheba, a subsidiary of Mars, began work on one of the world’s largest coral restoration programmes, called Hope Reef, which is located off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia and had been heavily damaged by past blast fishing and other disruptions. Blast fishing, which uses dynamite or other explosives to kill fish, reduces the underwater landscape to shifting rubble, which doesn’t allow coral to grow.
The project uses reef stars, hexagonal steel structures, to which corals are attached, explains Jos van Oostrum, senior director of sustainable solutions at Mars. “These ‘loaded’ reef stars are interconnected underwater and anchored to the deserted rubble fields, to provide a strong stable platform for attached corals to grow. Over time, native corals settle onto the reef stars, corals grow, and the structures become fully integrated into the reef,” he says.
According to van Oostrum, coral coverage of Hope Reef has grown from 2% to 70% thanks to the project, and the fish population has increased by 260%. Sheba is expanding its coral restoration efforts to key sites around the world in Indonesia, Australia, The Maldives, Kenya, Mexico, and Costa Rica, he says. The project aims to restore more than 221,000 sq yards (185,000 sq m) of reef by 2029.
Helping corals help themselves
Not everyone in the field agrees with the premise that human-driven coral restoration is the best approach towards saving and protecting coral. Erika Woolsey, chief scientist and chief executive at the environmental non-profit The Hydrous, says that in some instances coral has shown great resilience and the ability to replenish itself without direct assistance. Woolsey points to recent research on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef which shows that coral reefs are recovering on their own from a 2022 mass bleaching event.“When you look at the impacts of reef restoration efforts it accounts for less than 1% of the whole Great Barrier Reef,” says Woolsey. “Whereas the natural cycles are replenishing huge areas which makes you really question the efficacy of rehabilitation projects.”
Woolsey isn’t opposed to novel reef restoration methods but feels that public education and creating empathy for marine environments are the salient issues.
“Reef restoration efforts can be effective in certain scenarios but all of these different approaches have yet to be proven at scale,” says Woolsey. “However, we know that to save coral reefs, we really have to combat climate change, remove local stressors, like overfishing, and prevent overgrowth of microalgae. Those are the proven solutions.”
We know that to save coral reefs, we really have to combat climate change – Erika Woolsey
Meanwhile, Foster at Coral Maker, the robot-assisted project, sees another potential function for mass-produced coral skeletons: helping corals move to cooler waters where they may be less at risk, a step known as assisted migration.“I think if we had the technology to deploy them [manufactured coral skeletons] at scale, we could consider things like assisted migration where we take corals that are in areas that are in danger, and move them further from the equator, to cooler water temperatures,” says Foster.
Since coral lacks fins or legs, it has little ability to adapt to climate change by quickly moving to cooler waters. However, assisted migration for coral is controversial in the scientific community and has not been tried at scale. One the major concerns is that the risks associated with moving coral reefs to new areas are unknown and could negatively impact the ecosystem into which it would be introduced. Transplanted coral of certain types might become invasive, or bring with it microbes that negatively affect native sea life.
“I was trained as a conservationist and you do not interfere, you don’t move things to new locations,” says Foster. “There’s always a can of worms that opens up when you do that sort of thing. But we’re dealing with an era of rapid climate change and we know that there’s a risk of not acting.”
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