Scientists Mount Cameras On Endangered Sea Lions To Map Australia's Ocean Floor 10
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Australian sea lions glide and dart through underwater tunnels, over seagrass beds and rocky reefs, searching for a meal and dancing with dolphins around a giant bait ball of fish -- all the action captured by a camera stuck on their back. "I can watch this stuff for hours," says Prof Simon Goldsworthy. "It's like the best slow TV ever. You just don't know what you're going to see next." The Australian sea lion is in trouble. They were hunted until the early 20th century. Commercial fishing nets and pots have proved to be a more modern threat. Numbers have crashed by 60% in the past 40 years, leaving only about 10,000 of them mostly spread thinly across 80 breeding sites along Australia's south and west coastline.
Goldsworthy's "slow TV" is the result of new efforts to employ the sea lions to map the ocean floor -- and their own habitats -- by sticking cameras with satellite tracking to their backs. So far, eight females from two seal colonies have filmed almost 90 hours of footage across more than 500km, helping scientists to map 5,000 sq km of habitat. The sea lions have mapped rocky reefs and seagrass meadows along the continental shelf, and shown humans the places that are important to them. With that information, conservationists will have much clearer ideas on how to protect the country's only endemic seal. A study outlining the sea lions' camera work has been published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
Goldsworthy's "slow TV" is the result of new efforts to employ the sea lions to map the ocean floor -- and their own habitats -- by sticking cameras with satellite tracking to their backs. So far, eight females from two seal colonies have filmed almost 90 hours of footage across more than 500km, helping scientists to map 5,000 sq km of habitat. The sea lions have mapped rocky reefs and seagrass meadows along the continental shelf, and shown humans the places that are important to them. With that information, conservationists will have much clearer ideas on how to protect the country's only endemic seal. A study outlining the sea lions' camera work has been published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
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Slashdot is so full of douche bags, now.
Yeah, those recent arrivals really suck, huh?
Some of them don't even know what the userids mean! ;)
[off-topic] (Score:1)
Just a note to the editors:
"Posted by BeauHD on Saturday August 10, 2024 @11:00PM".
It's now after midnight on a Saturday night - if you want to post localised content it might help if you post stories about Australia when the majority of Australians haven't just returned from the pub!
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it might help if you post stories about Australia when the majority of Australians haven't just returned from the pub!
Believe it or not, Slashdot stories don't self-destruct: you have plenty of time to sober up and read them tomorrow. And very few of them require immediate action on your part.
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Okay, so I read the report 9 1/2 hrs later...
[I learned a new word, 'benthic'. I assumed it had something to do with philosopher Jeremy Bentham but that would lead to a Wikipedia rabbit hole about his curiously preserved body.]
If Google wants to develop a map of the ocean floor, there's now precedent for using mammals to do the work. The ethics of this, well, at my local lake they tags swans with a collar to study migration patterns surrounding the Grand Prix, so Bentham might have approved on utilitarian g
But (Score:2)
do they taste like chicken?
slavery or exploitation if a corporation did it (Score:2)
- Capture, immobilize, tranquilize or otherwise interfere with the free will of a free animal
- Add a burden or restraint on the animal - mount cameras on animals
- Use animals as unpaid slaves to collect data
- Use collected data, project information, etc. for professional or career profit
It a scientist does this, it is OK and interesting.
If a corporation does the exact same thing, it is exploitation, cruelty and will get attention from the SPCA.
Satire: Now consider a possible sister project of using migratin
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Scientist / goverment - default good; others bad (Score:2)
How many of these agenda pushing science good / government agency action good stories are we going to see?
If a corporation doing the exact same thing would be considered evil, then question the original news story.
This is not a point about the particular science here, it is about how science is given a pass in the media, with praise and never asking the hard questions about the research, its results, its funding, was there a higher priority research which could have been funded....
For example, what would be