Hacking nature - albatross and illegal fishing

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Very ingenious hack - from Smithsonian Magazine:

Albatrosses Outfitted With GPS Trackers Detect Illegal Fishing Vessels

No creature knows the sea quite like the albatross
Boasting wingspans of up to 11 feet—the largest of any bird alive today—these feathered goliaths, native to the Southern Ocean and North Pacific, are built to soar. Gliding at speeds that often exceed 50 miles per hour, they can cover vast swaths of the sea in minutes, all the while scouring the water for bright flickers of fish. Some species are known to spend years at sea without touching down on land, and a few have even been documented circumnavigating the globe.

With their keen eyes and wandering ways, albatrosses are, in a way, the de facto “sentinels of the sea,” says Henri Weimerskirch, a marine ornithologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Weimerskirch is working to make that title a little more official—by recruiting the seabirds to patrol the ocean for illegal fishing vessels. He and his colleagues have outfitted nearly 200 albatrosses with tiny GPS trackers that detect radar emissions from suspicious ships, allowing the birds to transmit the locations of fishers in the midst of illicit acts. The results of the tracking method were published today in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The idea:

The team’s winged recruits may be poised to fill this monitoring gap. On top of their stamina and moxie, albatrosses also have a certain fondness for fish-toting vessels, says study author Samantha Patrick, a marine biologist at the University of Liverpool. To the birds, the fishing gear attached to these boats is basically a smorgasbord of snacks—and albatrosses can spot the ships from almost 20 miles away.

And the results? Surprisingly good:

Over the course of six months, the team’s army of albatrosses surveyed over 20 million square miles of sea. Whenever the birds came within three or so miles of a boat, their trackers logged its coordinates, then beamed them via satellite to an online database that officials could access and cross-check with AIS data. Of the 353 fishing vessels detected, a whopping 28 percent had their AIS switched off—a finding that caught Weimerskirch totally off guard. “No one thought it would be so high,” he says.

AIS is an Automatic Identification System - a beacon that larger boats are supposed to have which continually broadcasts the boats ID and it's position. Very handy for safety.

Very clever hack to use the birds to track the fishing vessels.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on January 28, 2020 7:32 AM.

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