Unmanned 'Terminator' Robots Kill Jellyfish 149
First time accepted submitter starr802 writes "Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, have developed a 'jellyfish terminator' robot set out to detect the marine coelenterate and kill it. Scientists started developing the robots three years ago after South Korea experienced jellyfish attacks along its southwest coast, where they clogged fishing nets and ate fish eggs and plankton, Discovery News reports. The Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm or JEROS has two motors that let it move forward, backwards and rotate at 360 degrees." In related news, the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden was shut down recently after moon jellyfish overwhelmed the screens and filters in cooling pipes."
people = shit (Score:5, Insightful)
What needs to be done is to destroy the fishing fleets.
Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
While the nerd im me can't help to appreciate the tech in those things that make them auto-detect and kill stuff, I'm not convinced this is a good idea at all.
Wouldn't it make more sense to fix the root cause of this problem, that is, overfishing?
Did they even consider the consequences of generating 400 kilos of dead stuff an hour? Something will probably find this a nice food source. Are we going to kill that too, and where does this end?
Are we sure it only kill jellyfish?
The ecosystem is screwed (Score:5, Insightful)
There are supposed to be predators keeping these creatures in check. Unfortunately, we've overfished the oceans and polluted them so heavily that this problem is only set to grow.
Re:Bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it make more sense to fix the root cause of this problem, that is, overfishing?
Heh heh heh. Overfishing. I mean, that's part of the problem, but did you forget about acidification? (Let's just gloss over nuclear currents for a moment.) The significant sea creatures that can tolerate it gracefully are brittle stars [nature.com] and jellyfish [msn.com]. Algae will do okay as well, but kelp won't -- the increased acidification promotes algae that competes with it. So you get a big soup of stars, jellies, and algae. Mmmmmmmm good.
As for what the jellyfish become food for, it's everything below it, like always. Unless you have a problem with bottom-dwellers there's no reason to complain about that. The real issue is what we're doing to our biosphere that's causing these problems.
By all means, stop overfishing, HAHAHAHA. But that won't stop this.