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.
Re:people = shit (Score:4, Interesting)
Unintended consequences.
We hunt the predators ie fish. Their prey take over the ocean. Literally.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?page=1 [nybooks.com]
Re:people = shit (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear mods:
The parent post does not count as flamebait, quite the opposite, he has very bluntly and articulately identified the root cause of the current overabundance of jellyfish.
Humans can still fish (although we really should limit ourselves to recreational fishing, and stick with farmed fish for food production). But modern supertrawlers don't just decimate fish populations, they catch the entire population in an area.
You want to get rid of jellyfish, get rid of these floating offenses to biodiversity by any means possible. Ban them, sink them, make their crew pariahs. If the fish come back, the jellyfish will vanish.
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Actually it wasn't all that much about jellyfish as much as what the fuck we're doing to all sea life, sea bottoms, wild life in general, insects, forests, our water, the climate.
The comments about how this and that have to go always come from people who benefit on the death of those individuals either by direct usage and sales or by getting rid of competition.
But it's very obvious who the biggest issue is, who's the largest predator, the one who really throw ecological systems out of balance, poison the pl
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We need to eat jellyfishes instead! ;)
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Re: people = shit (Score:3)
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Read your linked articles. This paragraph pretty much sums it up:
"Nearly all salmon Americans eat are farm-raised -- grown in dense-packed pens near ocean shores, fed fish meal that can be polluted with toxic PCB chemicals, awash in excrement flushed out to sea and infused with antibiotics to combat unsanitary conditions. Some salmon are raised on farms that use more sustainable methods, but you can't tell from the packaging."
So basically, there's nothing wrong with fish farms that mandating independent mon
Robots to kill moon jellyfish (Score:5, Interesting)
We are living in the future.
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They are dying of future!
Aren't we all? ;-)
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Re:Robots to kill moon jellyfish (Score:5, Funny)
If they wanted to live they should have stayed on the moon.
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NASA should create a task to send those poor animals back to the moon, where they can leave in peace.
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The moon is an alabaster retard.
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Eh, it'd be more impressive if they ATE the jellyfish to power themselves
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It'd be even more impressive if they were robot jellyfish.
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Nah, it would be more impressive if they MATE with the jellyfish thus leading to more androidjellies.
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If they ate the jellyfish used them for power and then used the elemental components to build more jellyfish killers, THAT is the best idea so far.
Hopefully they never run out of jellyfish...
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Until they realize that man is the cause of over population and hundreds of new terminators come out of the ocean patterned from captured tv signals and looking like Summer Glau...
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Thanks for the 'heads up', as I'm trapped here in Oklahoma. I need to move to the coast...out on a beach.
I, for one, do not want to miss out on this opportunity!
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Actually Climate change will raise ocean temperatures and make it EASIER for ocean life to thrive.
Re:Robots to kill moon jellyfish (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually Climate change will raise ocean temperatures and make it EASIER for ocean life to thrive
Some types of Ocean life perhaps, but not necessarily the stuff that feeds or even the stuff that isn't unpleasant to share a swim. The stuff we don't care for so much Jellyfish and tiny creatures that we mostly experiences as mats of nasty scum will probably take over.
If the temperatures of sea water rise much it gets more acidic. Other complex life hostile chemical events around surfer and phosphorus might also turn it into a toxic soup.
If some of the marine biology people are right the rise in sea level is going to be the least of what we humans experience as problems. I am not at all convinced by the AGW science, I don't support carbon emissions regulation and might not even if we had conclusive evidence climate change was a man made event, because I think we should be making the investment in adaptation at this point. We are already near 400ppm its likely positive feed back at this point with our without us. We need to be looking geoengineering and finding solutions to actively control the climate.
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See it positively: When the ocean turns into a toxic acidic soup, killing most animals living there, the dead animals will sink to the ocean floor and take their carbon with them. Indeed, it's likely that over millions of years, new crude oil will formed of them (who said crude oil was not renewable?). OK, so we probably won't be there to profit from it, but be assured the next intelligent species will be happy to boost their economy with all that oil we helped forming by burning the old one.
Maybe that's on
Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015 to 2019 (Score:2)
Re:Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015 to 20 (Score:4, Informative)
You REALLY don't want to read the third paragraph of this article then.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/?page=2 [nybooks.com]
It'll scare the crap out of you. Seriously.
Here's a sample:
One of the fastest breeders of all is Mnemiopsis. Biologists characterize it as a “self-fertilizing simultaneous hermaphrodite,” which means that it doesn’t need a partner to reproduce, nor does it need to switch from one sex to the other, but can be both sexes at once. It begins laying eggs when just thirteen days old, and is soon laying 10,000 per day.
Jellyfish are voracious feeders. Mnemiopsis is able to eat over ten times its own body weight in food, and to double in size, each day.
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More:
The question of jellyfish death is vexing. If jellyfish fall on hard times, they can simply “de-grow.” That is, they reduce in size, but their bodies remain in proportion.
One kind of jellyfish, which might be termed the zombie jelly, is quite literally immortal. When Turritopsis dohrnii “dies” it begins to disintegrate, which is pretty much what you expect from a corpse. But then something strange happens. A number of cells escape the rotting body. These cells somehow find each other, and reaggregate to form a polyp. All of this happens within five days of the jellyfish’s “death,” and weirdly, it’s the norm for the species.
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There will be a net gain in ocean life for every degree it goes up.
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Actually, that's what is happening right now - it's why there's a jellyfish problem to begin with. And algae blooms are common, all a direct result of ocean warming.
The stuff we like to eat from the water can't really survive - the algae de-o
Re:Robots to kill moon jellyfish (Score:4, Informative)
No, because the carbon dioxide is making the ocean more acidic. And I have a link!
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-acidification-carbon-dioxide-emissions-levels [theguardian.com]
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Well, until the trend of oceans sinking up the carbon dioxide ends, it will become more and more acidic, killing all the marine life. Then, after it begins to heat up, much of the life will have already gone extinct. Just like when someone cooks your dinner, and then cools it down before it gets to your plate, it that doesn't reverse the process of cooking it.
Here is another link describing what AC is talking about! http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20413-warmer-oceans-release-co2-faster-than-thought.ht [newscientist.com]
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Well, until the trend of oceans sinking up the carbon dioxide ends, it will become more and more acidic, killing all the marine life.
You purport that no marine life can live in an ocean with a ph of 7?
The ocean is currently a base(how else could you have so much undissolved calcium carbonate in it? Aka coral), 'ocean acidification' from CO2 will only bring it to a neutral PH (7)
While I am sure some critters will have problems with a neutral ocean(Coral for example), I strongly doubt all of them would.
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Please mod parent up.
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Mostly it's because colder water tends to be water brought up from the depths, which carries nutrients leached out of the ocean bottom. The Humbolt Current off the west coast of South America is a good example. There are several oceanic 'deserts' where very little grows because all the nutrients have been used up by the time currents carry the water there. They're in warm water areas of course, since the water has had time to warm up during its contact with the surface on the way there.
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Not really. It depends on the reason the ocean temperatures rise. If it is because of increasing CO2, then the oceans become acidified thus killing reefs and destroying entire ecosystems. Even if CO2 doesn't make the temperature rise, it is bad news for ocean life.
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Just remember, the actual equation is this:
overfishing + climate change == oceans are screwed FOR US.
We got rid of predators (fish), so their prey (jellyfish) have grown out of control.
The jellyfish are perfectly happy with this.
We might have to start eating differently.
http://sandiego.metblogs.com/2009/05/03/the-truth-about-eating-a-jellyfish/ [metblogs.com]
Don't jellyfishes refrigerate? (Score:1)
I though jellyfishes would prove good nuke-plan refrigeration material.
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I've eaten pickled jellyfish at Chinese restaurant. They were okay but I doubt you'd get a lot of nutrients out of them.
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Philip K Dick short story (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds like Philip K Dick's "Second Variety" short story...
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Except that those robots were deployed against the Russians. They are quite unlike the jellyfishes, in spite of what Americans may believe.
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?
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Did they even consider the consequences of generating 400 kilos of dead stuff an hour?
400 kg of biomass per hour to incinerate for energy generation or to turn into hydrocarbons to make the process self-sustaining?
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Meaning we'll all have a micro- mobile swimming killer bio reactor in 10 years then, yay for progress!
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.
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It would help. There are large predatory fish that eat jellyfish, they might suffer due acidification anyway, but fishing them to extinction is not helping.
BlueFin Tuna needs to be added to CITES.
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Wouldn't it make more sense to fix the root cause of this problem, that is, overfishing?
It's that simple, is it? People can just stop eating?
Why are humans the only species that doesn't get to compete?
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You don't seem to understand the concept of 'overfishing'. It's a short-term solution to feeding people, not a long term survival strategy. Overfish a species badly enough and the fishery collapses and doesn't recover, like the Peruvian anchovy fishery. Almost no one eats Humbolt Current anchovies now, because there aren't enough to be worth catching and there probably won't be again for decades. It's not like this was unprecedented, the same thing happened in California just a couple decades earlier.
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There's a difference between 'not fishing' and 'not overfishing'.
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The first idea was to kill them with fire but they ran into some problems.
Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
"South Korea experienced jellyfish attacks along its southwest coast, where they (...) ate fish eggs and plankton,"
The bastards!
What about Dolphins and sharks? Do they have a robot for those too?
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Well, them eating fish eggs is not spectacular, but it can be problematic - it means that once they are abundant, it's harder for fish to make a comeback.
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these are not normal Korean jellyfish, these are an invasive species, looks like fat american variety, but actually traced to the torpedo-tubes of israeli submarines lurking in Asian waters.
usnavy has sonar which repeatedly and consistently kills most whales within its range. this fact has been largely ignored until last week. mass-media prefers to blame dead whales on the Northerners and Japanese.
sharks are altogether a different problem
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these are not normal Korean jellyfish, these are an invasive species, looks like fat american variety, but actually traced to the torpedo-tubes of israeli submarines lurking in Asian waters.
usnavy has sonar which repeatedly and consistently kills most whales within its range. this fact has been largely ignored until last week. mass-media prefers to blame dead whales on the Northerners and Japanese.
sharks are altogether a different problem
Gotta kill these fat american invaders!
Smile!! You're on NSA Camera!
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Sorry to pop your silly geopolitical bubble, but the U.S. does not pull S. Korea's wires and China does not pull the Norks. Both Ks are adamantly opposed to foreign manipulation by anyone. China recently had to impose trade blocks for certain goods to the Norks because they couldn't pull their wires any other way. The U.S. would much rather remove its troops but would also like a trading partner that was not glowing red, so they keep them there.
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"South Korea experienced jellyfish attacks along its southwest coast, where they (...) ate fish eggs and plankton,"
The bastards! What about Dolphins and sharks? Do they have a robot for those too?
No, but they did just sign a defense pact with the Japanese, who have sworn to protect the Koreans from hordes of whales!
Bad feeling about this (Score:5, Funny)
Because you know one of these days Jellyfish Connor is going to subvert one of these and travel back into our time to protect his parents.
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.
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Maybe we can eat the JEROS. As long as we have a self-sustaining population of killer robots roaming the seas replacing the natural predators, we should probably try to get something good out of them, right? :-)
aquarium sized? (Score:2)
The Great Robot-Jellyfish War of 2013 (Score:5, Funny)
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I think we'll all look back with pride when we tell our grandchildren how we served on the day our country called us.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots." -The Secret War of Lisa Simpson
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What about when the jellyfish call in a giant carbon-consuming space jellyfish to consume all the terrestrial biomass?
Who's next (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who's next (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, they first came for the terrorists, then for political dissidents and rebels, and only then, the jellyfish.
Amoebas should start worrying.
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But all the amoeabas are in politics, they have nothing to worry about. Keep voting them in people!
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This is just stupid (Score:1)
So instead of fish they are catching jelly fish.
And their reaction is to design a robot to kill jelly fish.
Why not simply catch the jelly fish and eat them?
I know that in certain parts of china they eat jelly fish. I've had it and it's pretty good.
If they just start eating those the population of jelly fish will naturally decrease without having to wastefully kill them for nothing.
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I think those that are eaten in China are the non-weaponized kind. Eating jellyfish venom cannot be good for your circulatory system. And the ones that bite are the worst.
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This Robot == LOL (Score:3, Informative)
Have you watched the video,
the robot consists of a funnel made from rope and suspenders, an digital sensor (on off / perhaps optical to it can differentiate between a tuna and jelly fish) and a propeller (looks like electric outboard motor)
The jelly fish is detected, the electric motor is switched on and the jelly fish is sucked in and hacked by the rotating propeller.
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Watching that video, I can only visualize the jellyfish screams, as they are shredded into a liquid vapor.
However on an evolutionary perspective of food-chain, this might be a local improvement. Robots are good at large-scale gardening.
Re:This Robot == LOL (Score:5, Informative)
That's just the business end. If you actually read the article, you'd know that the whole buoy-shaped contraption at the top of the page is the robot; it uses a camera to identify jellyfish and plots its own path to efficiently patrol through the swarm. It's an impressive computer vision and AI achievement.
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-37374-9_38 [springer.com]
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I was referring to the news article linked in the summary. The original research article is just for flavour.
2015: Terminator2 robots created to kill previous (Score:2)
News in 2015: Terminator Mark2 robots created to kill Terminator Jellyfish hunter robots clogging fishing nets....
This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create s
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What are they hiding? (Score:2)
to detect the marine coelenterate and kill it.
I don't like the way they use the singular there...
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The ultimate goal is to find the Lord of the Deep and then use the "rotating blades of death" as a more sensationalist headline described it.
ation (Score:2)
I think the above line in the article gets my award for highest "-ation" density. Possibly excluding fragments of one or two rap songs that made it past my 5-second response time.
There are already terminators developed! (Score:2)
--Coder
Rumor has it (Score:2)
Puree? (Score:2)
Can't they put large spinning blades in front of the screens on the cooling pipes? Or use some other means like sonic demolition to destroy the critters before they get to the screens?
Wait, Jellyfish? (Score:1)
Unintended consequences? (Score:2)
When these robots run out of prey, they might crawl up on land and seek out some other soft, spineless form of life. Politicians.
What kind of jellyfish? (Score:1)
What an infestation looks like. (Score:2)
Well... (Score:1)
First they came for the jellyfish, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't a jellyfish...