Thanks to some clever engineering, the researchers did so without flustering these highly sensitive animals, making Mesobot a groundbreaking new tool for oceanographers.
“It's really an amazing piece of work, in terms of looking at an area that's unexplored in the ocean.â€.
“Most mid-water animals are extremely sensitive to any hydrodynamic disturbance.
“Evolution doesn't waste a lot of capability on stuff that doesn't work very well, so most animals are blind to red light,†says Yoerger.
So it's a trade-off: You need a lot of light, you need a sensitive camera, and then you can work in the red.â€.
Yoerger and his colleagues demonstrated the robot’s capabilities in California's Monterey Bay at 650 feet deep, as it detected and then pursued a hunting jellyfish.
Just observing sea creatures with a camera won’t tell you what they’ve been eating, for instance, and therefore where they fit into the food web—you’d need a dissection for that.
I think that's very doable,†says Yoerger.
“We have so few observations about a lot of fish,†says Luiz Rocha, curator of fishes at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies reefs in the twilight zone but wasn’t involved in this new work.