Get Ready for the Robotic Fish Revolution
March 26th, 2024
Via 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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Tidal: Alphabet X’s New Effort to Protect The Oceans
November 3rd, 2023Via MIT Technology Review, a look at a previously unreported Alphabet X program to use cameras, computer vision, and machine learning to track the carbon stored in the biomass of the oceans:
In late September, Bianca Bahman snorkeled above a seagrass meadow off the western coast of Flores, a scorpion-shaped volcanic island in eastern Indonesia. As she flutter-kicked over the green seabed, Bahman steered an underwater camera suspended on a pair of small pontoons.
The stereoscopic camera captures high-resolution footage from two slightly different angles, creating a three-dimensional map of the ribbon-shaped leaves sprouting from the seafloor.
Bahman is a project manager for Tidal, whose team wants to use these cameras, along with computer vision and machine learning, to get a better understanding of life beneath the oceans. Tidal has used the same camera system to monitor fish in aquafarms off the coast of Norway for several years.
Now, MIT Technology Review can report, Tidal hopes its system can help preserve and restore the world’s seagrass beds, accelerating efforts to harness the oceans to suck up and store away far more carbon dioxide.
Tidal is a project within Alphabet’s X division, the so-called moonshot factory. Its mission is to improve our understanding of underwater ecosystems in order to inform and incentivize efforts to protect the oceans amid mounting threats from pollution, overfishing, ocean acidification, and global warming.
Its tools “can unlock areas that are desperately needed in the ocean world,” Bahman says.
Studies suggest the oceans could pull down a sizable share of the billions of additional tons of carbon dioxide that may need to be scrubbed from the atmosphere each year to keep temperatures in check by midcentury. But making that happen will require restoring coastal ecosystems, growing more seaweed, adding nutrients to stimulate plankton growth, or similar interventions.
Tidal decided to focus initially on seagrass because it’s a fast-growing plant that’s particularly effective at absorbing carbon dioxide from shallow waters. These coastal meadows might be able to suck up much more if communities, companies, or nonprofits take steps to expand them.
But scientists have only a rudimentary understanding of how much carbon seagrass sequesters, and how big a role the plant plays in regulating the climate. Without that knowledge and affordable ways to verify that restoration efforts actually store away more carbon, it will be tricky to track climate progress and build credible carbon credit marketplaces that would pay for such practices.
Tidal hopes to crack the problem by developing models and algorithms that translate the three-dimensional maps of seagrass it captures into reliable estimates of the carbon held below. If it works, automated versions of Tidal’s data-harvesting technology could provide that missing verification tool. This could help kick-start and lend credibility to marine-based carbon credit projects and markets, helping to restore ocean ecosystems and slow climate change.
The team envisions creating autonomous versions of its tools, possibly in the form of swimming robots equipped with its cameras, that can remotely monitor coastlines and estimate the growth or loss of biomass.
“If we can quantify and measure these systems, we can then drive investment to protect and conserve them,” says Neil Davé, the general manager of Tidal.
Still, some scientists are skeptical that Tidal’s technology will be able to accurately estimate shifting carbon levels in distant corners of the globe, among other challenges. Indeed, nature-based carbon credits have faced growing criticism: studies and reporting find that such efforts can overestimate climate benefits, create environmental risks, or present environmental justice concerns.
Davé acknowledges that they don’t know how well it will work yet. But he says that’s precisely what the Tidal team went to Indonesia, along with a group of Australian scientists, to try to find out.
Google launched what was then called Google X in early 2010, with a mandate to go after big, hard, even zany ideas that could produce the next Google.
This research division took over the self-driving-car project now known as Waymo. It developed the Google Brain machine-learning tools that power YouTube recommendations, Google Translate, and numerous other core products of its parent company. And it gave the world the Google Glass augmented-reality headset (whether the world wanted it or not). There were even short-lived flirtations with things like space elevators and teleportation.
X pursued climate-related projects from the start, but has had a very mixed track record in this area to date.
It acquired Makani, an effort to capture wind energy from large, looping kites, but the company shut down in 2020. It also pursued a project to produce carbon-neutral fuels from seawater, dubbed Foghorn, but abandoned the effort after finding it’d be too hard to match the cost of gasoline.
The two official climate “graduates” still operating are Malta, a spinout that relies on molten salt to store energy for the grid in the form of heat, and Dandelion Energy, which taps into geothermal energy to heat and cool homes. Both, however, remain relatively small and are still striving to gain traction in their respective markets.
After 12 years, X has yet to deliver a breakout success in climate or clean tech. The question is whether shifting strategies at X, and the current crop of climate-related efforts like Tidal, will improve that track record.
Astro Teller, the head of X, told MIT Technology Review that the division “pushed hard on radical innovation” at first. But it has since gradually turned up the “rigor dials” in lots of ways, he says, focusing more on the feasibility of the ideas it pursued.
The earlier X climate efforts were generally high-risk, hardware-heavy projects that directly addressed energy technologies and climate emissions, producing electricity, fuels, and storage in novel ways.
There are some clear differences in the climate projects that X is publicly known to be pursuing now. The two aside from Tidal are Mineral, which is using solar-panel-equipped robots and machine learning to improve agricultural practices, and Tapestry, which is developing ways to simulate, predict, and optimize the management of electricity grids.
With Tidal, Mineral, and Tapestry, X is creating tools to ensure that industries can do more to address environmental dangers and that ecosystems can survive in a hotter, harsher world. It’s also leaning heavily in to its parent company’s areas of strength, drawing on Alphabet’s robotics expertise as well as its ability to derive insights from massive amounts of data using artificial intelligence.
Such efforts might seem less transformative than, say, flying wind turbines—less moonshot, more enabling technology.
But while Teller allows that their new thinking may “be changing the character of the things that you see at X today,” he pushes back against the suggestion that the problems it’s pursuing aren’t as hard, big, or important as in the past.
“I don’t know that Tidal has to apologize for some sort of scope problem,” he says.
“Humanity needs the oceans and is killing off the oceans,” he adds. “We have to find a way to get more value from the ocean for humanity, while simultaneously regenerating the oceans instead of continuing to deplete them. And that’s just not going to happen unless we find a way to get automation into the oceans.”
A better protein source
Tidal, founded in 2018, grew out of informal conversations at X about the mounting threats to the oceans and the lack of knowledge required to address them, Davé says.“The goal was overly simplistic: save the oceans, save the world,” he says. “But it was based on the understanding that the oceans are critical to humanity, but probably the most neglected or misused resource we have.”
They decided to begin by focusing on a single application: aquaculture, which relies on land-based tanks, sheltered bays, or open ocean pens to raise fish, shellfish, seaweed, and more. Today, these practices produce just over half the fish consumed by humans. But the more they’re used, the more they might ease the commercial pressures to overfish, the emissions from fishing fleets, and the environmental impact of trawling.
Tidal believed it could provide tools that would allow aquafarmers to monitor their fish in a more affordable way, spot signs of problems earlier, and optimize their processes to ensure better health and faster growth, at lower cost.
The researchers developed and tested a variety of prototypes for underwater camera systems. They also began training computer vision software, which can identify objects and attributes within footage. To get it started, they used goldfish in a kiddie pool.
For the last five years, they’ve been stress-testing their tools in the harsh conditions of the North Sea, through a partnership with the Norwegian seafood company Mowi.
During a Zoom call, Davé pulled up a black-and-white video of the chaos that ensues at feeding time, when salmon compete to gobble up the food dropped into the pen. It’s impossible for the naked eye to draw much meaning from the scene. But the computer vision software tags each fish with tiny colored boxes as it identifies individuals swimming through the frame, or captures them opening their mouths to feed.
Davé says fish farms can use that data in real time, even in an automated way. For instance, they might stop dropping food into the pen when the fish cease feeding.
The cameras and software can perceive other important information as well, including how much the fish weigh, whether they have reached sexual maturity, and whether they show any signs of health problems. They can detect spinal deformities, bacterial infections, and the presence of parasites known as sea lice, which are often too tiny for the human eye to see.
“We knew from the early days that aquaculture would be us getting our feet wet, so to speak,” says Grace Young, Tidal’s scientific lead. “We knew it would be a stepping stone into working on other hard problems.”
Confident that it’s created one viable commercial application, Tidal is now turning its attention to gathering information about natural ocean ecosystems.
“Now is a big moment for us,” she adds, “because we’re able to see how the tools that we built can apply and make a difference in other ocean industries.”
Restoring our coasts
Seagrasses form thick meadows that can run thousands of miles along shallow coastlines, covering up to about 0.2% of the world’s ocean floors. They provide nutrients and habitat to marine populations, filter pollution, and protect coastlines.The plants are photosynthetic, producing the food they need from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide dissolved in ocean waters. They store carbon in their biomass and deliver it into the seabed sediments. They also help capture and bury the carbon in other organic matter that floats past.
Globally, seagrass beds may sequester as much as 8.5 billion tons of organic carbon in seafloor sediments and, to a much, much smaller degree, in their biomass. On the high end, these meadows draw down and store away about 110 million additional tons each year.
But estimates of the total range and carbon uptake rates of seagrass vary widely. A key reason is that there is no cheap and easy way to map the planet’s extensive coastlines. Only about 60% of seagrass meadows have been surveyed in US waters, with “varying degrees of accuracy because of difficulties in remote sensing of underwater habitat,” according to a National Academies study.
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The seagrass meadows along Waecicu Beach in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia.Whatever their full expanse, though, we know they are shrinking. Development, overfishing, and pollution are all destroying coastal ecosystems, which also include carbon-sucking habitats like mangrove forests and salt marshes. Draining and excavating these shallow biological communities releases hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year. Meanwhile, climate change itself is making ocean waters warmer, more acidic, and deeper, placing greater strains on many of the species.
Nations could help halt or reverse these trends by converting developed shorelines back into natural ones, actively managing and restoring wetlands and seagrass meadows, or planting them in new areas where they may do better as ocean levels rise.
Such work, however, would be wildly expensive. The question is who would pay for it, particularly if it comes at the expense of lucrative coastal development.
The main possibility is that companies or governments could create market incentives to support preservation and restoration by awarding credits for the additional carbon that seagrass, mangroves, and salt marshes take up and store away. Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of carbon credits are likely to be traded in voluntary markets in the coming decades, by some estimates.
The carbon market registry Verra has already developed a methodology for calculating the carbon credits earned through such work. At least one seagrass project has applied to earn credits: a long-running effort by the Nature Conservancy’s Virginia chapter to plant eelgrass around the Virginia Barrier Islands.
But some marine scientists and carbon market experts argue that there need to be more rigorous ways to ensure that these efforts are removing as much carbon as they claim. Otherwise, we risk allowing people or businesses to buy and sell carbon credits without meaningfully helping the climate.
Diving in
Tidal began exploring whether its tools could be used for seagrass late last year, as a growing body of studies underscored the need for carbon removal and highlighted the potential role of ocean-based approaches.“We started to double-click and read a lot of studies,” Davé says. “And found out, ‘Wow, we do have some technology we’ve developed that could be applicable here.’”
The team eventually held a series of conversations with researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), an Australian government science agency that has long used drones, satellites, acoustic positioning systems, and other equipment to survey coral reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows across the Indo-Pacific.
Seagrass is particularly difficult to map on large scales because in satellite images it’s difficult to distinguish from other dark spots in shallow waters, says Andy Steven, a marine scientist who oversees coastal research efforts at CSIRO.
“The world needs to move to being able to map and then measure change on a far more frequent basis,” Steven says. “I see the Tidal technology being part of an arsenal of methods that help us rapidly survey, process, and deliver information to decision makers on the time frames that are needed. It is addressing a really fundamental issue.”
CSIRO agreed to help Tidal test how well its system works. They collaborated on an earlier field trial off the coast of Fiji this summer and on the subsequent experiment this September in Indonesia. The latter country’s thousands of islands boast one of the world’s largest and most diverse expanses of seagrass meadows.
For the first effort, Tidal opted to couple its software with an off-the-shelf autonomous underwater vehicle equipped with a basic camera. The hope was that if the researchers could scan meadows using standard hardware, their general approach would be more widely accessible.
It didn’t work. The seagrass was taller and the tides were lower than expected. The thruster and rudder quickly got clogged up with seaweed, forcing the team to stop every few minutes, Bahman says.
After a brainstorming whiteboard session, the Tidal team decided to take its own camera system, turn it face down, and put it on a float that could be pulled along by a boat. The so-called Hammersled is equipped with fins to keep it moving straight and a set of ropes and cleats that allow the researchers to dip the camera deeper into the water.
Tidal’s researchers test out the “Hammersled” at a pool in the middle of Alphabet’s campus in Sunnyvale, California, by pulling it over patches of plastic seagrass.
The system worked well enough during a few tests in a large pool in the middle of Alphabet’s campus in Sunnyvale, California, where team members pulled it by hand over patches of plastic seagrass on the bottom.
The bigger test, however, is whether Tidal can translate its maps into an accurate estimate of the carbon seagrass holds and buries in the seafloor.
‘We’ve got it’
After Steven and his colleagues arrived in Labuan Bajo, on the western tip of Flores, they rented a 14-cabin liveaboard, the Sea Safari VII, and began sailing around the islands. They launched surveillance drones from the deck to search for promising seagrass beds to study, prioritizing sites with many different species to help train Tidal’s models and algorithms for the wide variability that occurs in the natural world.Once the CSIRO researchers selected, measured, tagged, filmed, and photographed their 100-meter transects, the Tidal team passed through.
They used a little Indonesian fishing boat to pull along the Hammersled. Bahman, software engineer Hector Yee, and other staffers took turns jumping into the water with goggles and flippers to clasp a pontoon and keep the camera pointed straight as they crisscrossed the test area.
Once the process was complete, the CSIRO researchers used spades, peat borers, and other tools to pull up the seagrass and deep sediments from one-meter square study plots.
Back on the main island, the Australian scientists used makeshift ovens, including some created from hair dryers, to dry out the plant materials and sediments. Then they ground them up and deposited them into hundreds of plastic bags, carefully marked to denote different locations and depths.
In the months to come, they’ll analyze the carbon content in each batch at their labs in Adelaide, determining the total amount in each plot.
“If our algorithm takes a look at the data we gathered before they took the core samples and comes up with the same answer, then we’ve got it,” says Terry Smith, a solutions engineer with Tidal.
Open questions
Not everyone, however, is convinced that seagrass is a particularly promising path for carbon removal, or one whose climate benefits we’ll be able to accurately assess.Among the suite of approaches to carbon removal that the National Academies has explored in its studies, those focusing on coastal ecosystems rank near the bottom in terms of the potential to scale them up. That’s largely because these ecosystems can only exist as narrow bands along shorelines, and there’s considerable competition with human activity.
“We need to do everything we can to preserve seagrass,” says Isaac Santos, a professor of marine biogeochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, because of the valuable roles these plants play in protecting coasts, marine biodiversity, and more.
“But on the big question—Are they going to save us from climate change?—the answer is straightforward: No,” he says. “They don’t have enough area to sequester enough carbon to make a big impact.”
Accurately determining the net carbon and climate impact from seagrass restoration is also problematic, as studies have highlighted.
Carbon sequestration varies dramatically in these coastal meadows, depending on the location, the season, the mix of species, and how much gets gobbled up by fish and other marine creatures. The carbon in seafloor sediments can also leak into the surrounding waters, where some is dissolved and effectively remains in the ocean for millennia, and some may escape back out into the atmosphere. In addition, coastal ecosystems produce methane and nitrous oxide, potent greenhouse gases that would need to be factored into any estimate of overall climate impact.
Finally, the vast, vast majority of the carbon in seagrass beds is buried in the seafloor, not in the plant material that Tidal intends to measure.
“And we also know that the correlation between biomass and sediment carbon is not straight forward,” Santos said in an email. “Hence, any approach based on biomass only will require all sorts of validations,” to ensure that it actually provides reliable estimates of stored carbon.
An essay in The Conversation late last month highlighted another concern: environmental justice. The authors, Sonja Klinsky of Arizona State University and Terre Satterfield of the University of British Columbia, stressed that the local communities most affected by such projects should have considerable say in them. Some coastal towns may not want to turn their active harbor back into, say, a salt marsh.
“Much of the global population lives near the ocean,” they wrote, and some interventions “might impinge on places that support jobs and communities” and provide significant amounts of food.
Unlocking the secrets
Addressing the scientific questions will require better understanding of coastline ecosystems. CSIRO’s Steven says he hopes that Tidal’s technology will provide easier ways to conduct the necessary studies. “It’s absolutely a challenge,” he says. “But you’ve got to start somewhere.”As for the environmental justice concerns, Tidal stresses that these nature-based approaches to carbon removal potentially provide multiple benefits to natural ecosystems and local communities. They could, for instance, help to sustain fishery populations. Tidal is also working with CSIRO to train local communities in Fiji and Indonesia, including university students, to help them participate directly in carbon markets.
“Ultimately, our vision is to provide these communities with tools to be able to manage, protect, and repopulate these local systems locally,” Davé said in an email.
So what’s next for Tidal?
It will still take months for the Australian team to complete its analysis of the seagrass and sediments. Whatever they find, the teams plan to continue conducting field experiments to refine the models and algorithms and make sure they provide accurate carbon estimates across a variety of seagrass types in different regions and conditions.
For instance, Tidal may look to partner with other research groups focused on the Bahamas, another major seagrass region.
If it does ultimately work well, Tidal believes, its suite of tools could also support other ocean-based approaches to carbon removal, including growing more seaweed and restoring mangrove forests.
Davé says he can envision a variety of potential business models, including providing carbon measurement, reporting, and verification as a service to offsets registries or organizations carrying out restoration work. They might also create autonomous robotic systems that plant seagrass with little human involvement.
Even if the systems don’t provide reliable enough carbon estimates, Tidal believes its efforts will still aid scientific efforts to understand crucial ocean ecosystems, and support international efforts to protect them. That could include monitoring the well-being of coral reefs, which are gravely threatened by warming waters, Davé says.
It may not sound like a moonshot in the way that X originally conceived of the concept. It’s certainly no space elevator.
But by building tools that a variety of organizations could use in a variety of ways to unlock the secrets of Earth’s critical and fragile ecosystems, Tidal may be demonstrating a new way to take on really hard problems.
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Can a Map of the Ocean Floor Be Crowdsourced?
October 3rd, 2023Via BBC, an article on the potential for crowdsourcing to help map the ocean floor:
Tucked inside a federal government building in the American Rockies is the world’s best collection of seafloor maps. Occasionally a hard drive arrives in the mail, filled with new bathymetric – or seafloor – charts collected by survey vessels and research ships cruising the seas. The world’s largest public map of Earth’s oceans grows just a little bit more.
Cloaked in ocean, the seafloor has resisted human exploration for centuries. Folklore and myths told of it as the domain of terrifying sea monsters, gods, goddesses and lost underwater cities. Victorian-era sailors believed that there was no ocean floor at all, just an infinite abyss where the bodies of drowned sailors came to rest in watery purgatory.
Throughout the last century, modern scientific techniques and sonar have dispelled the stories and revealed a little understood seascape of crusted brine lakes, steaming volcanoes, and vast undulating underwater plains. We have only just begun to map, much less explore, this enormous subsea world.
One organisation wants to change this – and quickly. In 2023, Seabed 2030 announced that its latest map of the entire seafloor is nearly 25% complete. The data to make the world’s first publicly available map is stored at the International Hydrography Organization (IHO)’s Data Centre for Digital Bathymetry (DCDB) in a government building in Boulder, Colorado.
So far, the DCDB holds over 40 compressed terabytes of seafloor data. The biggest contributor is the US academic fleet: 17 research vessels owned by American universities which constantly circle the globe studying the deep ocean. Other contributors include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fleet, the Geological Survey of Ireland, and Germany’s Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency. The biggest users are scientists all over the world who rely on the data to conduct research.
Seabed 2030 has made extraordinary progress by asking countries and corporations to share maps with the DCDB. But unfortunately, the map is not growing quickly enough. Between 2016 and 2021, the map leapfrogged from 6% to 20%. Since then, the pace has slowed. In 2022, it reached just 23.3% complete; in 2023, 24.9%. The ocean mappers came up with a new plan: crowdsourcing.
By attaching a data logger to a boat’s echosounder, any vessel can build a simple map of the seafloor
“Crowdsourced bathymetry came about a few years ago when the IHO was saying: ‘At this rate, we’re never going to map the whole darn ocean; we need to start looking outside the box,'” says Jennifer Jencks, the director of the DCDB and the chair of a crowdsourced working group at the IHO.By attaching a data logger to a boat’s echosounder, any vessel can build a simple map of the seafloor. This is crucial in developing coastal and island nations. Tion Uriam, the head of the Hydrographic Unit at the Republic of Kiribati’s Ministry of Communications, Transport and Tourism Development, recently received two data loggers that he’s planning to install on local ferries. “It’s a win to be part of that initiative,” he says. “Just to put us on the map and raise our hands [to say] we want to be part of a global effort. Our contribution might be small – but it’s a contribution.”
Kiribati is a Pacific island nation of about 130,000 people spread across 33 coral atolls, only 20 of which are inhabited. British charts published in the 1950s and 1960s have been the most accurate maps to date; the United Kingdom and United States claimed various islands as protectorates or territories, mining them for phosphate or using them as whaling stations. Other British maps used are old and inaccurate; some date back to the late Victorian age or list depth measurements in fathoms, which most countries moved on from years go (the US only retired it in 2022).
That isn’t so unusual in the Pacific, according to marine geologist Kevin Mackay, who oversees Seabed 2030’s South and West Pacific Regional Centre at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) in the capital Wellington. “The big problem in the Pacific is the relic of the colonial system. So, in the Pacific, who looks after the mapping? It’s the Americans through their territories, or the UK through their territories, or the French and their islands, even though they’re now officially independent.” Kiribati gained independence in 1979, but there’s been little progress on surveying since then. In 2020, the World Bank funded a $42m (£34.1m) project to improve maritime infrastructure in the outer islands. A portion of that will go toward seabed mapping.
As one of the least developed countries in the world, most i-Kiribati (the name for Kiribati’s inhabitants) live in the capital of South Tawara: a 17 sq km (6.5 sq mile) crescent-shaped atoll with a population density equal to Tokyo. More people are crowding into the capital in search of a modern life, while the rest live on remote islands where poverty and unemployment is high, amenities are poor and the long-term future uncertain because of rising sea levels and severe tropical storms.
The military or commercial value of nautical charts will always be a barrier to achieving complete coverage of the world map
Improved charts could boost trade, transit and tourism on the outer islands. They could help communities plan for tsunamis, storm surges and rising shorelines. Many islands lack basic tide gauges, and so visiting ships time their arrival for high tide. In his meetings with government ministers, Uriam tries to stress the economic benefits of improving nautical charts in Kiribati.However, there’s a roadblock when it comes to sharing maps with the DCDB archive back in Boulder. Around a third of the IHO’s 98 member states allow crowdsourcing inside territorial waters. However, the Pacific island nations of Kiribati, the Independent State of Samoa and the Cook Islands, which all recently received data loggers from Seabed 2030, are not among them. Until the governments give their blessing, the new crowdsourced maps will remain under wraps.
Despite Seabed 2030’s publicly stated scientific goal, the military or commercial value of nautical charts will always be a barrier to achieving complete coverage of the world map. “Sea charts, by their very nature, were destined to be removed from the academic realm and from general circulation,” wrote the map historian Lloyd Brown in his book The Story of Maps. “They were much more than an aid to navigation; they were in effect, the key to empire, the way to wealth.”
In a world where only a quarter of the seafloor is charted, there’s still an advantage in knowing more than your rivals. Niwa’s Mackay experienced this himself on a scientific-mapping expedition. He received a call from a military he chooses not to name and “they said ‘you need to destroy that data because there was military value in what you’re mapping, because it’s a place where submarines like to hide’,” he recalls. “Obviously, we ignore them because we’re [mapping] for science, we don’t care. But the military, they find lots of value in bathymetry that, as a scientist, we don’t even think about.”
For some nations, it’s also suspicious that the DCDB is based in the United States, which has the world’s most powerful military. “We have seen concerns as well, that the DCDB is hosted by the United States. Not everyone loves that,” says Jencks. She tries to assuage these concerns by stressing that the DCDB was endorsed by all IHO member states back when it was created in 1990.
In Kiribati, the challenges are less political, more practical, according to Uriam. His position as the head of the Hydrographic Unit only became permanent about a year ago. He used to work in the fisheries department and he knows just how hard is to share data across departments, let alone with outsiders. There’s also hurdles around storing data and hiring people with the right expertise to manage them. Another concern: foreign research vessels have mapped some of Kiribati’s territorial waters before and neglected to share data with the country’s government.
With just over six years left until the deadline, Seabed 2030 faces serious challenges in finishing the first public map of the seafloor. The staggering size of the ocean, the depths, the hostile offshore working environment where ocean mappers are constantly contending with wind, waves, and the corrosive effects of salt water. Then there’s the cost of mapping remote international waters where no country has a responsibility to map.
However, all these challenges seem small compared to the work of uniting countries behind a collective goal, particularly ones as diverse as the US and the Republic of Kiribati. The differences help explain why the goal of finishing a complete map of the seafloor may remain out of reach for many decades to come.
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How to Use AI to Talk to Whales—and Save Life on Earth
September 3rd, 2023Via Wired, a look at how – with ecosystems in crisis – engineers and scientists are using AI to decipher what animals are saying, with the hope that – by truly listening to nature – humans will decide to protect it:
BEFORE MICHELLE FOURNET moved to Alaska on a whim in her early twenties, she’d never seen a whale. She took a job on a whale watching boat and, each day she was out on the water, gazed at the grand shapes moving under the surface. For her entire life, she realized, the natural world had been out there, and she’d been missing it. “I didn’t even know I was bereft,” she recalls. Later, as a graduate student in marine biology, Fournet wondered what else she was missing. The humpbacks she was getting to know revealed themselves in partial glimpses. What if she could hear what they were saying? She dropped a hydrophone in the water—but the only sound that came through was the mechanical churn of boats. The whales had fallen silent amid the racket. Just as Fournet had discovered nature, then, she was witnessing it recede. She resolved to help the whales. To do that, she needed to learn how to listen to them.
Fournet, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire and the director of a collective of conservation scientists, has spent the past decade building a catalog of the various chirps, shrieks, and groans that humpbacks make in daily life. The whales have huge and diverse vocabularies, but there is one thing they all say, whether male or female, young or old. To our meager human ears, it sounds something like a belly rumble punctuated by a water droplet: whup.
Fournet thinks the whup call is how the whales announce their presence to one another. A way of saying, “I’m here.” Last year, as part of a series of experiments to test her theory, Fournet piloted a skiff out into Alaska’s Frederick Sound, where humpbacks gather to feed on clouds of krill. She broadcast a sequence of whup calls and recorded what the whales did in response. Then, back on the beach, she put on headphones and listened to the audio. Her calls went out. The whales’ voices returned through the water: whup, whup, whup. Fournet describes it like this: The whales heard a voice say, “I am, I am here, I am me.” And they replied, “I also am, I am here, I am me.”
Biologists use this type of experiment, called a playback, to study what prompts an animal to speak. Fournet’s playbacks have so far used recordings of real whups. The method is imperfect, though, because humpbacks are highly attentive to who they’re talking to. If a whale recognizes the voice of the whale in the recording, how does that affect its response? Does it talk to a buddy differently than it would to a stranger? As a biologist, how do you ensure you’re sending out a neutral whup?
One answer is to create your own. Fournet has shared her catalog of humpback calls with the Earth Species Project, a group of technologists and engineers who, with the help of AI, are aiming to develop a synthetic whup. And they’re not just planning to emulate a humpback’s voice. The nonprofit’s mission is to open human ears to the chatter of the entire animal kingdom. In 30 years, they say, nature documentaries won’t need soothing Attenborough-style narration, because the dialog of the animals onscreen will be subtitled. And just as engineers today don’t need to know Mandarin or Turkish to build a chatbot in those languages, it will soon be possible to build one that speaks Humpback—or Hummingbird, or Bat, or Bee.
The idea of “decoding” animal communication is bold, maybe unbelievable, but a time of crisis calls for bold and unbelievable measures. Everywhere that humans are, which is everywhere, animals are vanishing. Wildlife populations across the planet have dropped an average of nearly 70 percent in the past 50 years, according to one estimate—and that’s just the portion of the crisis that scientists have measured. Thousands of species could disappear without humans knowing anything about them at all.
To decarbonize the economy and preserve ecosystems, we certainly don’t need to talk to animals. But the more we know about the lives of other creatures, the better we can care for those lives. And humans, being human, pay more attention to those who speak our language. The interaction that Earth Species wants to make possible, Fournet says, “helps a society that is disconnected from nature to reconnect with it.” The best technology gives humans a way to inhabit the world more fully. In that light, talking to animals could be its most natural application yet.
HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS known how to listen to other species, of course. Fishers throughout history collaborated with whales and dolphins to mutual benefit: a fish for them, a fish for us. In 19th-century Australia, a pod of killer whales was known to herd baleen whales into a bay near a whalers’ settlement, then slap their tails to alert the humans to ready the harpoons. (In exchange for their help, the orcas got first dibs on their favorite cuts, the lips and tongue.) Meanwhile, in the icy waters of Beringia, Inupiat people listened and spoke to bowhead whales before their hunts. As the environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth writes in her book Floating Coast, the Inupiat thought of the whales as neighbors occupying “their own country” who chose at times to offer their lives to humans—if humans deserved it.
Commercial whalers had a different approach. They saw whales as floating containers of blubber and baleen. The American whaling industry in the mid-19th century, and then the global whaling industry in the following century, very nearly obliterated several species, resulting in one of the largest-ever losses of wild animal life caused by humans. In the 1960s, 700,000 whales were killed, marking the peak of cetacean death. Then, something remarkable happened: We heard whales sing. On a trip to Bermuda, the biologists Roger and Katy Payne met a US naval engineer named Frank Watlington, who gave them recordings he’d made of strange melodies captured deep underwater. For centuries, sailors had recounted tales of eerie songs that emanated from their boats’ wooden hulls, whether from monsters or sirens they didn’t know. Watlington thought the sounds were from humpback whales. Go save them, he told the Paynes. They did, by releasing an album, Songs of the Humpback Whale, that made these singing whales famous. The Save the Whales movement took off soon after. In 1972, the US passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act; in 1986, commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission. In barely two decades, whales had transformed in the public eye into cognitively complex and gentle giants of the sea.
Roger Payne, who died earlier this year, spoke frequently about his belief that the more the public could know “curious and fascinating things” about whales, the more people would care what happened to them. In his opinion, science alone would never change the world, because humans don’t respond to data; they respond to emotion—to things that make them weep in awe or shiver with delight. He was in favor of wildlife tourism, zoos, and captive dolphin shows. However compromised the treatment of individual animals might be in these places, he believed, the extinction of a species is far worse. Conservationists have since held on to the idea that contact with animals can save them.
From this premise, Earth Species is taking the imaginative leap that AI can help us make first contact with animals. The organization’s founders, Aza Raskin and Britt Selvitelle, are both architects of our digital age. Raskin grew up in Silicon Valley; his father started Apple’s Macintosh project in the 1970s. Early in his career, Raskin helped to build Firefox, and in 2006 he created the infinite scroll, arguably his greatest and most dubious legacy. Repentant, he later calculated the collective human hours that his invention had wasted and arrived at a figure surpassing 100,000 lifetimes per week.
Raskin would sometimes hang out at a startup called Twitter, where he met Selvitelle, a founding employee. They stayed in touch. In 2013, Raskin heard a news story on the radio about gelada monkeys in Ethiopia whose communication had similar cadences to human speech. So similar, in fact, that the lead scientist would sometimes hear a voice talking to him, turn around, and be surprised to find a monkey there. The interviewer asked whether there was any way of knowing what they were trying to say. There wasn’t—but Raskin wondered if it might be possible to arrive at an answer with machine learning. He brought the idea up with Selvitelle, who had an interest in animal welfare.
For a while the idea was just an idea. Then, in 2017, new research showed that machines could translate between two languages without first being trained on bilingual texts. Google Translate had always mimicked the way a human might use a dictionary, just faster and at scale. But these new machine learning methods bypassed semantics altogether. They treated languages as geometric shapes and found where the shapes overlapped. If a machine could translate any language into English without needing to understand it first, Raskin thought, could it do the same with a gelada monkey’s wobble, an elephant’s infrasound, a bee’s waggle dance? A year later, Raskin and Selvitelle formed Earth Species.
Raskin believes that the ability to eavesdrop on animals will spur nothing less than a paradigm shift as historically significant as the Copernican revolution. He is fond of saying that “AI is the invention of modern optics.” By this he means that just as improvements to the telescope allowed 17th-century astronomers to perceive newfound stars and finally displace the Earth from the center of the cosmos, AI will help scientists hear what their ears alone cannot: that animals speak meaningfully, and in more ways than we can imagine. That their abilities, and their lives, are not less than ours. “This time we’re going to look out to the universe and discover humanity is not the center,” Raskin says.
Raskin and Selvitelle spent their first few years meeting with biologists and tagging along on fieldwork. They soon realized that the most obvious and immediate need in front of them wasn’t inciting revolution. It was sorting data. Two decades ago, a primate researcher would stand under a tree and hold a microphone in the air until her arm got tired. Now researchers can stick a portable biologger to a tree and collect a continuous stream of audio for a year. The many terabytes of data that result is more than any army of grad students could hope to tackle. But feed all this material to trained machine learning algorithms, and the computer can scan the data and flag the animal calls. It can distinguish a whup from a whistle. It can tell a gibbon’s voice from her brother’s. At least, that’s the hope. These tools need more data, research, and funding. Earth Species has a workforce of 15 people and a budget of a few million dollars. They’ve teamed up with several dozen biologists to start making headway on these practical tasks.
An early project took on one of the most significant challenges in animal communication research, known as the cocktail party problem: When a group of animals are talking to one another, how can you tell who’s saying what? In the open sea, schools of dolphins a thousand strong chatter all at once; scientists who record them end up with audio as dense with whistles and clicks as a stadium is with cheers. Even audio of just two or three animals is often unusable, says Laela Sayigh, an expert in bottlenose dolphin whistles, because you can’t tell where one dolphin stops talking and another starts. (Video doesn’t help, because dolphins don’t open their mouths when they speak.) Earth Species used Sayigh’s extensive database of signature whistles—the ones likened to names—to develop a neural network model that could separate overlapping animal voices. That model was useful only in lab conditions, but research is meant to be built on. A couple of months later, Google AI published a model for untangling wild birdsong.
Sayigh has proposed a tool that can serve as an emergency alert for dolphin mass strandings, which tend to recur in certain places around the globe. She lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, one such hot spot, where as often as a dozen times a year groups of dolphins get disoriented, inadvertently swim onto shore, and perish. Fortunately, there might be a way to predict this before it happens, Sayigh says. She hypothesizes that when the dolphins are stressed, they emit signature whistles more than usual, just as someone lost in a snowstorm might call out in panic. A computer trained to listen for these whistles could send an alert that prompts rescuers to reroute the dolphins before they hit the beach. In the Salish Sea—where, in 2018, a mother orca towing the body of her starved calf attracted global sympathy—there is an alert system, built by Google AI, that listens for resident killer whales and diverts ships out of their way.
For researchers and conservationists alike, the potential applications of machine learning are basically limitless. And Earth Species is not the only group working on decoding animal communication. Payne spent the last months of his life advising for Project CETI, a nonprofit that built a base in Dominica this year for the study of sperm whale communication. “Just imagine what would be possible if we understood what animals are saying to each other; what occupies their thoughts; what they love, fear, desire, avoid, hate, are intrigued by, and treasure,” he wrote in Time in June.
Many of the tools that Earth Species has developed so far offer more in the way of groundwork than immediate utility. Still, there’s a lot of optimism in this nascent field. With enough resources, several biologists told me, decoding is scientifically achievable. That’s only the beginning. The real hope is to bridge the gulf in understanding between an animal’s experience and ours, however vast—or narrow—that might be.
ARI FRIEDLAENDER HAS something that Earth Species needs: lots and lots of data. Friedlaender researches whale behavior at UC Santa Cruz. He got started as a tag guy: the person who balances at the edge of a boat as it chases a whale, holds out a long pole with a suction-cupped biologging tag attached to the end, and slaps the tag on a whale’s back as it rounds the surface. This is harder than it seems. Friedlaender proved himself adept—“I played sports in college,” he explains—and was soon traveling the seas on tagging expeditions.
The tags Friedlaender uses capture a remarkable amount of data. Each records not only GPS location, temperature, pressure, and sound, but also high-definition video and three-axis accelerometer data, the same tech that a Fitbit uses to count your steps or measure how deeply you’re sleeping. Taken together, the data illustrates, in cinematic detail, a day in the life of a whale: its every breath and every dive, its traverses through fields of sea nettles and jellyfish, its encounters with twirling sea lions.
Friedlaender shows me an animation he has made from one tag’s data. In it, a whale descends and loops through the water, traveling a multicolored three-dimensional course as if on an undersea Mario Kart track. Another animation depicts several whales blowing bubble nets, a feeding strategy in which they swim in circles around groups of fish, trap the fish in the center with a wall of bubbles, then lunge through, mouths gaping. Looking at the whales’ movements, I notice that while most of them have traced a neat spiral, one whale has produced a tangle of clumsy zigzags. “Probably a young animal,” Friedlaender says. “That one hasn’t figured things out yet.”
Friedlaender’s multifaceted data is especially useful for Earth Species because, as any biologist will tell you, animal communication isn’t purely verbal. It involves gestures and movement just as often as vocalizations. Diverse data sets get Earth Species closer to developing algorithms that can work across the full spectrum of the animal kingdom. The organization’s most recent work focuses on foundation models, the same kind of computation that powers generative AI like ChatGPT. Earlier this year, Earth Species published the first foundation model for animal communication. The model can already accurately sort beluga whale calls, and Earth Species plans to apply it to species as disparate as orangutans (who bellow), elephants (who send seismic rumbles through the ground), and jumping spiders (who vibrate their legs). Katie Zacarian, Earth Species’ CEO, describes the model this way: “Everything’s a nail, and it’s a hammer.”
Another application of Earth Species’ AI is generating animal calls, like an audio version of GPT. Raskin has made a few-second chirp of a chiffchaff bird. If this sounds like it’s getting ahead of decoding, it is—AI, as it turns out, is better at speaking than understanding. Earth Species is finding that the tools it is developing will likely have the ability to talk to animals even before they can decode. It may soon be possible, for example, to prompt an AI with a whup and have it continue a conversation in Humpback—without human observers knowing what either the machine or the whale is saying.
No one is expecting such a scenario to actually take place; that would be scientifically irresponsible, for one thing. The biologists working with Earth Species are motivated by knowledge, not dialog for the sake of it. Felix Effenberger, a senior AI research adviser for Earth Species, told me: “I don’t believe that we will have an English-Dolphin translator, OK? Where you put English into your smartphone and then it makes dolphin sounds and the dolphin goes off and fetches you some sea urchin. The goal is to first discover basic patterns of communication.”
So what will talking to animals look—sound—like? It needn’t be a free-form conversation to be astonishing. Speaking to animals in a controlled way, as with Fournet’s playback whups, is probably essential for scientists to try to understand them. After all, you wouldn’t try to learn German by going to a party in Berlin and sitting mutely in a corner.
Bird enthusiasts already use apps to snatch melodies out of the air and identify which species is singing. With an AI as your animal interpreter, imagine what more you could learn. You prompt it to make the sound of two humpbacks meeting, and it produces a whup. You prompt it to make the sound of a calf talking to its mother, and it produces a whisper. You prompt it to make the sound of a lovelorn male, and it produces a song.
NO SPECIES OF whale has ever been driven extinct by humans. This is hardly a victory. Numbers are only one measure of biodiversity. Animal lives are rich with all that they are saying and doing—with culture. While humpback populations have rebounded since their lowest point a half-century ago, what songs, what practices, did they lose in the meantime? Blue whales, hunted down to a mere 1 percent of their population, might have lost almost everything.
Christian Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews, believes that one of the essential tasks of conservation is to preserve nonhuman ways of being. “You’re not asking, ‘Are you there or are you not there?’” he says. “You are asking, ‘Are you there and happy, or unhappy?’”
Rutz is studying how the communication of Hawaiian crows has changed since 2002, when they went extinct in the wild. About 100 of these remarkable birds—one of few species known to use tools—are alive in protective captivity, and conservationists hope to eventually reintroduce them to the wild. But these crows may not yet be prepared. There is some evidence that the captive birds have forgotten useful vocabulary, including calls to defend their territory and warn of predators. Rutz is working with Earth Species to build an algorithm to sift through historical recordings of the extinct wild crows, pull out all the crows’ calls, and label them. If they find that calls were indeed lost, conservationists might generate those calls to teach them to the captive birds.
Rutz is careful to say that generating calls will be a decision made thoughtfully, when the time requires it. In a paper published in Science in July, he praised the extraordinary usefulness of machine learning. But he cautions that humans should think hard before intervening in animal lives. Just as AI’s potential remains unknown, it may carry risks that extend beyond what we can imagine. Rutz cites as an example the new songs composed each year by humpback whales that spread across the world like hit singles. Should these whales pick up on an AI-generated phrase and incorporate that into their routine, humans would be altering a million-year-old culture. “I think that is one of the systems that should be off-limits, at least for now,” he told me. “Who has the right to have a chat with a humpback whale?”
It’s not hard to imagine how AI that speaks to animals could be misused. Twentieth-century whalers employed the new technology of their day, too, emitting sonar at a frequency that drove whales to the surface in panic. But AI tools are only as good or bad as the things humans do with them. Tom Mustill, a conservation documentarian and the author of How to Speak Whale, suggests giving animal-decoding research the same resources as the most championed of scientific endeavors, like the Large Hadron Collider, the Human Genome Project, and the James Webb Space Telescope. “With so many technologies,” he told me, “it’s just left to the people who have developed it to do what they like until the rest of the world catches up. This is too important to let that happen.”
Billions of dollars are being funneled into AI companies, much of it in service of corporate profits: writing emails more quickly, creating stock photos more efficiently, delivering ads more effectively. Meanwhile, the mysteries of the natural world remain. One of the few things scientists know with certainty is how much they don’t know. When I ask Friedlaender whether spending so much time chasing whales has taught him much about them, he tells me he sometimes gives himself a simple test: After a whale goes under the surface, he tries to predict where it will come up next. “I close my eyes and say, ‘OK, I’ve put out 1,000 tags in my life, I’ve seen all this data. The whale is going to be over here.’ And the whale’s always over there,” he says. “I have no idea what these animals are doing.”
IF YOU COULD speak to a whale, what would you say? Would you ask White Gladis, the killer whale elevated to meme status this summer for sinking yachts off the Iberian coast, what motivated her rampage—fun, delusion, revenge? Would you tell Tahlequah, the mother orca grieving the death of her calf, that you, too, lost a child? Payne once said that if given the chance to speak to a whale, he’d like to hear its normal gossip: loves, feuds, infidelities. Also: “Sorry would be a good word to say.”
Then there is that thorny old philosophical problem. The question of umwelt, and what it’s like to be a bat, or a whale, or you. Even if we could speak to a whale, would we understand what it says? Or would its perception of the world, its entire ordering of consciousness, be so alien as to be unintelligible? If machines render human languages as shapes that overlap, perhaps English is a doughnut and Whalish is the hole.
Maybe, before you can speak to a whale, you must know what it is like to have a whale’s body. It is a body 50 million years older than our body. A body shaped to the sea, to move effortlessly through crushing depths, to counter the cold with sheer mass. As a whale, you choose when to breathe, or not. Mostly you are holding your breath. Because of this, you cannot smell or taste. You do not have hands to reach out and touch things with. Your eyes are functional, but sunlight penetrates water poorly. Usually you can’t even make out your own tail through the fog.
You would live in a cloud of hopeless obscurity were it not for your ears. Sound travels farther and faster through water than through air, and your world is illuminated by it. For you, every dark corner of the ocean rings with sound. You hear the patter of rain on the surface, the swish of krill, the blasts of oil drills. If you’re a sperm whale, you spend half your life in the pitch black of the deep sea, hunting squid by ear. You use sound to speak, too, just as humans do. But your voice, rather than dissipating instantly in the thin substance of air, sustains. Some whales can shout louder than a jet engine, their calls carrying 10,000 miles across the ocean floor.
But what is it like to be you, a whale? What thoughts do you think, what feelings do you feel? These are much harder things for scientists to know. A few clues come from observing how you talk to your own kind. If you’re born into a pod of killer whales, close-knit and xenophobic, one of the first things your mother and your grandmother teach you is your clan name. To belong must feel essential. (Remember Keiko, the orca who starred in the film Free Willy: When he was released to his native waters late in life, he failed to rejoin the company of wild whales and instead returned to die among humans.) If you’re a female sperm whale, you click to your clanmates to coordinate who’s watching whose baby; meanwhile, the babies babble back. You live on the go, constantly swimming to new waters, cultivating a disposition that is nervous and watchful. If you’re a male humpback, you spend your time singing alone in icy polar waters, far from your nearest companion. To infer loneliness, though, would be a human’s mistake. For a whale whose voice reaches across oceans, perhaps distance does not mean solitude. Perhaps, as you sing, you are always in conversation.
MICHELLE FOURNET WONDERS: How do we know whales would want to talk to us anyway? What she loves most about humpbacks is their indifference. “This animal is 40 feet long and weighs 75,000 pounds, and it doesn’t give a shit about you,” she told me. “Every breath it takes is grander than my entire existence.” Roger Payne observed something similar. He considered whales the only animal capable of an otherwise impossible feat: making humans feel small.
Early one morning in Monterey, California, I boarded a whale watching boat. The water was slate gray with white peaks. Flocks of small birds skittered across the surface. Three humpbacks appeared, backs rounding neatly out of the water. They flashed some tail, which was good for the group’s photographers. The fluke’s craggy ridge-line can be used, like a fingerprint, to distinguish individual whales.
Later, I uploaded a photo of one of the whales to Happywhale. The site identifies whales using a facial recognition algorithm modified for flukes. The humpback I submitted, one with a barnacle-encrusted tail, came back as CRC-19494. Seventeen years ago, this whale had been spotted off the west coast of Mexico. Since then, it had made its way up and down the Pacific between Baja and Monterey Bay. For a moment, I was impressed that this site could so easily fish an animal out of the ocean and deliver me a name. But then again, what did I know about this whale? Was it a mother, a father? Was this whale on Happywhale actually happy? The AI had no answers. I searched the whale’s profile and found a gallery of photos, from different angles, of a barnacled fluke. For now, that was all I could know.
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USVs Could Deter IUU Fishing
August 29th, 2023Via the US Naval Institute, a report on how unmanned saildrones deployed primarily for maritime security at present, can support conservation efforts:
In the opening scenes of Top Gun: Maverick, Admiral Chester Cain tells Maverick, “These planes you’ve been testing, Captain, one day, sooner than later, they won’t need pilots at all . . . the future is coming, and you’re not in it.” The Coast Guard faces a similar reckoning. Autonomous technology is an attractive solution to many maritime security challenges. Autonomous oceangoing vessels, for example, could be a critical force multiplier in combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. As the Coast Guard continues to increase its support of a free and open Indo-Pacific, it must expedite the deployment of autonomous technology to build its capacity to monitor, detect, and deter IUU fishing.
USVs as Deterrence
The presence of Coast Guard assets deters illegal fishing to some extent. This likely would be the case whether the asset were a cutter or an autonomous USV patrolling the high seas. If bad actors know a Coast Guard asset is in the area, they are more likely to check their practices and location before setting fishing lines.When a Coast Guard vessel is unavailable or unable to operate in a region for an extended period, autonomous USVs could be used to observe, detect, and deter IUU. In addition, the data collected by the USVs could support global transparency efforts and supply allies with critical information within the maritime domain. Following President Joe Biden’s recent announcement expanding the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, USVs could be used to provide presence in waters that are far from any support or persistent presence from a Coast Guard asset.
Commercially Available
USVs already have proved to be a viable tool for maritime domain awareness. The Coast Guard conducted a 30-day proof-of-concept in 2020, testing three different autonomous uncrewed surface vehicles. Yet, three years later, these “low-cost maritime domain awareness” solutions have yet to see active use by the Coast Guard. As the pilot study report noted, USVs could be a useful in identifying fishing vessel activity and supporting search and rescue. Further, reports from USVs could allow the Coast Guard to adaptively deploy cutter assets to areas of concentrated fishing effort.USVs are already supporting maritime domain awareness in other regions. The Saildrone has undertaken both maritime security and scientific missions. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tasked three Saildrones to sail more than 6,000 nautical miles collecting fisheries data, which in turn supported the Alaska Pollock Stock Assessment. In another 2021 partnership with NOAA, five Saildrones sailed into the eye of a hurricane. The U.S. Fifth Fleet has deployed Saildrones across the Arabian Gulf and has a goal of deploying 100 more by the end of summer 2023. In addition, the Fourth Fleet is preparing to deploy USVs to counter transnational criminal organizations and Chinese IUU fishing in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans off Central and South America.
NOAA and the Navy have integrated and successfully deployed Saildrone at scale, further demonstrating the applicability and utility of the technology. A USV program could be implemented immediately using the infrastructure and standard operating procedures established by Fifth Fleet. As Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan stated, “Tomorrow looks different. So will we. We will be a more adaptive and connected Coast Guard that generates sustained readiness, resilience, and capability—in new ways—to enhance our Nation’s maritime safety, security, and prosperity.” The Coast Guard must be innovative and able to adapt to the changing maritime landscape. Building capacity by deploying advanced technology in a public-private partnership would greatly advance the service, inspire its workforce, and change the game in maritime security.
Lack of Resources
The growing demand for assets in the Indo-Pacific has exacerbated the Coast Guard’s workforce shortage. The Indo-Pacific region covers more than 65 percent of the global maritime waters and 56 percent of the global ocean capture fisheries. With thousands of fishing and shipping vessels roaming the high seas, the Coast Guard requires additional support and ways to increase its presence. With current resource allocations, the service has little chance of covering this area of responsibility effectively to protect biodiversity and curb illegal fishing.Autonomous USVs could help fill the void. Autonomous seagoing USVs require less manning, less support, and can provide the necessary presence to deter illicit activity, offering a solution to the current and future manpower challenge.
The Human Element
While autonomous USVs are useful, they cannot replace a human in every situation. Manned ships and crews still will be needed to represent the United States, the Coast Guard, and democracy. A USV cannot provide the same relationship. However, this should not be seen as a shortfall, but rather a capability that must be strengthened. A USV can augment the mission and serve as a force multiplier. Imagine instead of sending one fast response cutter (FRC) 2,000 miles by itself, the Coast Guard sent an FRC and four Saildrones, which were able to expand and increase the coverage and presence in the region.The Gray Area of Regulatory Framework
Another challenge is the recognition of and regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles on the high seas. Consider the seizures of USVs by Iran in 2022 in the Red Sea and China in 2016 in the South China Sea. Following the 2016 incident, the Pentagon responded: “It is ours. It is clearly marked; we’d like to have it back and [would] like this to never happen again.” But the legal framework is not clear on what authorities a USV is granted.Questions for the future include how to treat these situations and what policy framework is needed. If a Chinese distant-water fishing vessel in the Indo-Pacific rams and sinks a Coast Guard USV, what legal repercussions should be pursued? The contingencies and legal response will need to be clear, concise, and well thought out, but this should not deter the Coast Guard from moving forward. Questions of USV management are already being addressed in the private and public sector on land, and these policies will help inform policies for the maritime environment. However, challenges will remain inside national jurisdictions and on the high seas. A similar challenge will play out in space in the coming years in terms of jurisdiction, responsibility, and legal authorities.
Looking Forward
There is no foreseeable future in which the Coast Guard would be better off without autonomous vehicles to support its Indo-Pacific strategy. As Admiral Thomas H. Collins stated in his 2004 essay, “Change and Continuity—The U.S. Coast Guard Today”: “Adapting to change is one of the most difficult tasks we face as individuals or as an organization, but with change comes new opportunities. We must inspire a culture of innovation . . . in all mission areas so as to enhance productivity and reduce workload—all the while driving towards quality outcomes.” Adopting this technology is not a question of when, but how fast.While USVs are not a panacea for all maritime security problems, they could increase the Coast Guard’s presence and deter illegal fishing. Getting eyes on the water could bring new opportunities for the service to better respond to the changing threats within the Indo-Pacific area of responsibility.
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