Google Funds A Starfish-Killing Robot To Save Australia's Great Barrier Reef (abc.net.au) 122
"It looks like a tiny yellow submarine, but this underwater drone is on a mission to kill," reports ABC. Specifically, to kill the starfish that are destroying coral on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. An anonymous reader quotes ABC:
In a bid to eradicate the pest, Queensland researchers have developed world-first robots to administer a lethal injection to the starfish using new technology... Researcher Matt Dunbabin said the technology was 99.4 per cent accurate in delivering a toxic substance only harmful to the starfish.... Divers have played a big role in helping to combat the starfish, but Professor Dunbabin said the robot would take the efforts to the next level. "Divers currently control certain areas, but there are not enough divers to actually make a difference on the scale of the reef," he said. The drone can also monitor and gather huge amounts of data about coral bleaching, water quality and pollution.
"RangerBot will be designed to stay underwater almost three times longer than a human diver, gather vastly more data, map expansive underwater areas at scales not previously possible, and operate in all conditions and all times of the day or night," according to Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology.
The starfish-killing robots were partially funded by Google (through their Google.org Impact Challenge program to fund and support nonprofit innovators), reports The Drive. One study had found the reef's coral cover declined 50% between 1985 and 2012, "with nearly half of that drop resulting from the coral-destroying starfish species."
"RangerBot will be designed to stay underwater almost three times longer than a human diver, gather vastly more data, map expansive underwater areas at scales not previously possible, and operate in all conditions and all times of the day or night," according to Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology.
The starfish-killing robots were partially funded by Google (through their Google.org Impact Challenge program to fund and support nonprofit innovators), reports The Drive. One study had found the reef's coral cover declined 50% between 1985 and 2012, "with nearly half of that drop resulting from the coral-destroying starfish species."
Autonomous killing machines... (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought, Google employees were very much against this sort of thing [slashdot.org]. And Electronic Frontier Foundation disapproves too [slashdot.org].
Or is it only bad, when American military works on it?
Yeah, sure "fish aren't humans" — will the robot (particularly, the software) require much rework to begin killing, say, enemy divers?
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Be careful, you'll strain a muscle reaching so far like that
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Yeah, sure "fish aren't humans" — will the robot (particularly, the software) require much rework to begin killing, say, enemy divers?
"Hey guys! Someone sent us a box of cool Patrick-themed wetsuits! Who wants one?"
Re:Autonomous killing machines... (Score:4, Informative)
I thought, Google employees were very much against this sort of thing [slashdot.org]. And Electronic Frontier Foundation disapproves too [slashdot.org].
Or is it only bad, when American military works on it?
Hmm... rudimentary environment management versus autonomous murder machines. Nope, totally the same thing!
Yeah, sure "fish aren't humans" — will the robot (particularly, the software) require much rework to begin killing, say, enemy divers?
it's not even fish they are killing, it's starfish! Starfish have a very distinct shape and move very slowly. You would need to completely rewrite all the computer vision software to have it kill any divers, much less enemy divers.
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Most star fish have 5 extremities.
So has a human.
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You would need to completely rewrite all the computer vision software to have it kill any divers, much less enemy divers.
Just cut'n'paste that part from the UBER software [nytimes.com] to target people. I'm pretty sure thats how it works.
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And the article says that the injection is lethal only to starfish, so even if it somehow thought that a human was a starfish, it would only be annoying.
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It Begins (Score:1)
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It would have been obligatory, if the news story was that of a cell-phone dropping the seagull in the ocean.
Mercenary robots (Score:2)
I hope we see more robots like this, to weed out Africanized honeybees from native bees (a small but loud propellor might do the trick), the invasive albizia trees in Kauai, the brown tree snake in Guam, etc. Also for forest management across North America, by strategically clearing out some of the younger trees in order to keep wildfire temperatures low and give the older trees a better chance to survive.
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This species of starfish is native to the region. The predation cycle they function under has been long ongoing.
This modern trend of primeval nature worship that is rising among people who primarily spend their lives in the cities utterly alienated from nature, believing that natural state of things is stable persistence rather than constant cycles of boom and bust is anti-evolutionary to levels that are beyond even creationism.
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Nice try but one of the pest's few natural predators, the giant triton (a species of snail), has been unsustainably harvested from coral reefs for their shells. Their population has not recovered. So some population control of the COTS is definitely warranted.
Also: "If you love nature, stay away from it." --Henry David Thoreau
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Some states and canada are releasing wasps to kill ash borers. The ash borers are an invasive tree-killing species.
Wikipedia seems to be a little outdated, as they have not spotted the bugs in the PNW, and wasp are being used.
https://dnrtreelink.wordpress.... [wordpress.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Lots of bad critters are being fought all over with interesting solutions.
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Local effects and local pollution are causing the issues, not some massively complex "climate change".
Yes one would assume that if they don't know what they are talking about. Back in reality the starfish are only partially the cause of the great barrier reef death, and the population boom of those starfish are caused by .... climate change.
Ultimately though the root cause of all of this is that the world is full of idiots such as yourself.
Same head line in 30 years (Score:1)
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Terrorists are eroding our borders? I thought they were trying to "erode" our skyscrapers.
Why not catch them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it not make more sense to catch them and make food from them?
Worst case cat food or dog food?
In some countries it is common to eat them: http://www.chinesestreetfood.c... [chinesestreetfood.com]
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This is Australia. The spines are poisonous. You outsiders never learn.
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I once proposed that we leak the idea that smoking Paterson's Curse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echium_plantagineum) could get you stoned. Then the hippies would take care of it. Maybe this will work with the Crown of Thorns starfish, if the hippies can hold their breaths long enough.
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These aren't your friendly neighbourhood starfish. Crown-Of-Thorns are not edible. Even if they were, they are difficult to handle (being venomous like every other frigging thing in Australia)
And if they were it wouldn't solve the problem either. There are many millions of the things. They are also very hard to indiscriminately catch. You can't fish for them, you need to dive for them.
There are active efforts to kill them off en mass but even these efforts currently involve diving hitting them with a toxin
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You can't fish for them, you need to dive for them. ... at least that was my idea.
The robot injecting them could do that
Nonetheless it is barely making a dent in the population. ... species like that simply release eggs and sperm into the water. As long as there is no one eating the eggs, killing them makes only more room for the offsprings.
Obviously
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killing them makes only more room for the offsprings.
It's not a room issue. The problem is they will reproduce to the point of starvation and starvation will only occur when the entire reef is dead. They produce 50 million eggs per season each, only a small portion of them need to survive for that to be a problem.
In peak season divers can kill about 45000 of these things each week. Even if all those were captured I doubt you'll find enough people willing to eat the things.
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Well,
if they are dead and are lying around on the ground, they are food for their offsprings.
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Sadly no. These starfish don't feed on fish or each other. They feed on scleractinian which are the structures that support corals.
They are an invasive pest for this reason, few natural predators and few natural sources for population control to bring them back to a level where they don't completely destroy the environment. :-(
They inject them with Alex Jones Male Enhancher (Score:2)
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Well, you had to ask didn't you.
<URL:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff_NRSf4s20&ab_channel=Engadget/>
ok! (Score:2)
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https://www.wired.co.uk/articl... [wired.co.uk]
The mosquito-killing laser turret!
Watch the video, it's highly satisfying.
Captcha (Score:1)
Please click all the pictures with starfish on them until there are none left and then click OK.
Killer Robot (Score:1)
Apple Funds a Robot-Killing Robot to Save Australia's Starfish. Details at 10:00.
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And So It Begins (Score:1)
with starfish and ends with humanity!
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
This particular starfish species is an invasive pest in Australia.
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so are most Australians
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This particular starfish species is an invasive pest in Australia.
Whereas the robots are a natural part of the ecosystem?
But I get what you're saying. We know what we're doing - it's not like the old days when we were arrogant about these things. There is no chance of the robots affecting other life in the oceans. There is no chance of them damaging the coral. Nothing can go wrong.
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Do something = something might go wrong.
Do nothing = something will go wrong.
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They are a pest to commercial fisheries, who fished out all the starfish predators, and whose members in the past would bisect the starfish and return the remains overboard, not realizing they created another starfish and possibly a population explosion. Crown-of-thorns role in reef ecology is not entirely understood, but one known role is crown-of-thorns prevents fast-growing coral from overpowering the slower growing coral varieties. This species is not invasive, but native to the GBR.
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Well, we let them do it though.
Re: WTF? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, we let them do it though.
I didn't. I protested vigorously, but being only six months old, my angered cries were misinterpreted.
Re: WTF? (Score:2)
Invasive introduced (likely by ship bilges) species that's doing a monster truck load of damage
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This is what the ecologists are up to nowadays, building robots to kill wildlife?
Trying to maintain balance in the wildlife that humans have fucked up has been what ecologists have been up to since the beginning. The only difference is earlier on they were making things progressively worse not better.
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Humans are fucking up the environment, that is why the coral reefs are in danger. In the face of what humanity is doing on a global scale, nature can't take care of itself.
I don't know whether killing the starfish truly is necessary, but I suspect corals are ecologically more valuable than the starfish.
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Asking whether the coral is more "ecologically valuable" than the starfish is premature, because we don't really understand the ecological relationship between the starfish and the reef. It is possible that the reef as we know it might not even be possible without starfish predation.
The crown-of-thorns starfish not some exotic species, it evolved with the corals it preys upon. Had humans never evolved, it would still be killing off sections of coral reef, only there wouldn't be anyone around to be upset a
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Will this cause or fix environmental damage? (Score:2)
Humans are fucking up the environment
Yes, but the pertinent question is whether releasing starfish killing robots is going to be another example of this. Our attempts to fix environmental damage in the past by releasing new organisms to try and kill off some other organism that has got out of control have not exactly been a roaring success. Are we going to kill off the starfish only to find that the reason for their large numbers is that they are eating some other organism that is even more damaging to the reef? Past performance suggests this
Re:Humans Need to Leave Nature the Fuck Alone (Score:5, Informative)
wrong [pnas.org]
Seriously, Is it too much to ask that slashdotters keep up with the professional literature?
Re:Humans Need to Leave Nature the Fuck Alone (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new <looks at parent UID> errrr, <head asplodes> must not come here very often.
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Re:Humans Need to Leave Nature the Fuck Alone (Score:4, Informative)
That study puts starfish as cause of 42% of coral losses per year. Seriously?
Reef has been there for hundreds, more likely thousands of years. Same for the starfish. Personal hypothesis: environmental conditions change (for example, sea water acidity), coral weakens as a result, and starfish take advantage of the situation.
Cause of death of the coral? Yes. Cause of the problem in the overall scheme of things? Hell no - external factors. It's those external factors we should be looking at. Not those starfish that do what they do once conditions are favourable.
Re:Humans Need to Leave Nature the Fuck Alone (Score:4, Insightful)
Your'e a marine biologist, right?
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Two major precipitating factors are nutrient runoff from Indonesian sugarcane farms, and global warming; both of which won't be solved any time soon, without a lot of international cooperation. This method is fairly unilateral,
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How about sugarcane elimination robots, then? They can look like salt shakers and cry 'EX-TER-MI-NATE!' as they do their job.
Salt shakers vs. sugar, who will win?!
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Do you understand that your statement is literally anti-evolutionary? Everything on this planet "have not been there before" on long enough time scale, because that's how evolution works.
And as far as scientific language works, these are species native to the region.
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The reef has not been around that long and has been routinely destroyed, quite a few times. The reef as we know it now was a coastal formation, well above sea level, for over twenty thousand years, before it was submerged around ten thousand year ago and started to regrow. It does have predators and will move away from a zone where to detects them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. In fact it is likely the lack of these that is causing the problem, because pretty shell and are more edible than their prey.
G
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Can you please link to your peer reviewed study?
Otherwise STFU and let the adults talk.
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Re: Humans Need to Leave Nature the Fuck Alone (Score:2)
This is all being done in the name of "save the reef!!!!!!" when nature can fucking take care of itself without needlessly killing shit.
You must be new to this planet. The primary way that nature "takes care of itself" is by needlessly killing a fucktonne of shit.
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I worked for many years in the control of vector-borne diseases. There has never been a successful case of mosquito eradication from a region. Never.
In fact pursing the goal of eradication actually makes it harder to limit human exposure harder in the long term. The reason is that to eradicate a mosquito population, you'd have to saturate the entire region with lethal doses of pesticide, which is physically and economically impossible.
Attempting total eradication only creates evolutionary pressure on the
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Oh, really?
Better tell the CSIRO they are imagining this then.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... [abc.net.au]
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A population *crash* isn't tantamount to eradication.
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It's actually a biological fact, without mosquitos some things wouldn't happen
Yea, I wouldn't get bitten by fucking mosquitoes for one.
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It's actually a biological fact, without mosquitos some things wouldn't happen and you haven't predicted what that is.
No animal on earth gets the majority of its food intake from mosquitoes. Whatever wouldn't happen is almost certainly minor.