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A Clever Robot Spies on Creatures in the Ocean's ‘Twilight Zone’ - WIRED
Jun 16, 2021 1 min, 18 secs
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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.”.

“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.”.

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.

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