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WETA Working on Robotic Lizard For Science
Roland Piquepaille writes "The tuatara, which is both related to lizards and snakes, is one of the planet's oldest reptile species. It's been living in New Zealand for about 200 million years. Scientists still don't know much about their behavior, so they've asked Weta Workshop, a Wellington-based company known for its work on 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, to build a robotic male tuatara. It is equipped with cameras which will help the researchers to discover how real male tuatara attract and keep females. The goal is to help conservation managers to the genetically fittest, most productive males. But what will happen if a female tuatara discovers that the robot is an impostor?"
Maybe I'm missing the point here... but are they trying to replicate the appearance and behavior of an animal to study the behavior of real version of the animal? ...I sense a logic error.
But really- what about all the chemical signatures? Hormones, pheromones, various smells, etc.
"But what will happen if a female tuatara discovers that the robot is an impostor?" Welcome out new Cyborg lizard Overloards.
Wouldn't they want to use a female to learn about male behavior instead of a male. Yes, with a male they can do aggression tests with robot vs. animal. However, with a female that attracts males, they can see real animals vs. animal aggression and behavior.
Not another Rob Schneider movie!
They're gonna build a stud Tutuara? I think their females are a little more discerning then that!
:P
They should build a female, I've met some pretty crazy females and they do quite well.
Male [Tutuara's] just aren't that discerning.
The article says "tuatara", it doesn't say "tutuara" a single time. Where could any possible confusion come from?
...they'll probably sell it in their Tutuara sex shop. Probably marketed under iTutuargasm trademark...
WTF is a Tutuara?
Could we at least get the name right in the title?
Tuatara
Advanced users are users too!
It's a Tuatara, not a Tutuara...
Is it just me or are they screwing with just about everything by doing this? Conservation does not mean every single animal species should survive. If they're too stupid/malfunctional to mate on their own, shouldn't they not survive? I thought that was the whole point lol. By using robots and scientists and stuff to mess with the processes and trying to determine which ones should mate and forcing them find each other based on our judgement, instead of letting them do it on their own, can't end well.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
lizard bar + lizard booze + sexy lizard whore = some bad ass lizard dominance.
Mark Tilden is the father of robots that mimic biology. What he has clearly demonstrated is that behavior, especially in insects, obeys very simple rules.
His insect robots have almost no processing power and yet mimic the behavior of real bugs very well.
Based on Tilden's experience, it would seem that these lizard? experimenters may actually be on the right path.
http://home.earthlink.net/~douglaspage/id25.html
YAY, now I can get an evening of peace while his lizard love bot entertains him!!
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
we be slow - this got lolbotted days before it got slashdotted -> http://www.lolbots.com/
Complete Satisfaction?
Let me just say that endangered tuatara's taste delicious.
*ducks*
Just kidding. Spotted kiwi birds and little blue penguins taste much better.
All joking aside, we've got got a lot of truly unique wildlife here. I feel fortunate to have seen some of these, even if only at the zoo.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
like playing Leisure Suit Larry.
Lounge Lizard? Get it? funny? ok, i'll take a seat over there.
Task Mangler
I wonder if this robot is related to a certain movie arthropod.
the tuatara has vestigal third eye. According to wikipedia it can be seen up until maturity. And it retains much of the anatomical features of an eye, including a lense, cornea and retina with rod like cells.
it is interesting that the pineal gland is thought to be a vestigal third eye. there is a clear relation between visualisation/consciousness and an eye.
The tuatara isn't actually a lizard (any more than a crocodile is). They're pretty neat reptiles -- as a poster notes below, they have a "third eye" (they're not unique in this regard, some iguana species do as well, but not as well-developed as the tuatara's) -- and they require cold temperatures. Non-New Zealand zoos that get tuatara have to have triple cooling methods.
These guys are suspicious to me. They make feautre movie CGI animation, statues, robots, clothing lines, steampunk guns, paintings, magazines and comic books.
:(
I'm telling you, it's all a huge scam, an experiment to push us and see at what point we realize it's all a reality game. Right? Right!?
I... I wanna work there
'The tuatara, which is both related to lizards and snakes'. I'm going back long years, and knowledge changes, but I don't believe that that quoted above is correct, except in a very general and meaningless way. As I remember they are a remnant of the dinosaur era.
phindrup
There are 5 types of reptiles: lizards, snakes, turtles, crocs and tuataras ...
This robot makes an ideal spy!
It will happen the same as when human females discover you are a geek...
All this talk of lizards and mating reminds me of Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Looking for Love...
That's almost like equipping an android (or in lieu of that, a geek) with cameras to figure out how "real" men "attract and keep females".
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
It looks like, basically, what's been created is a realistic robot tuatara designed to attract females and essentially turn them on sexually through dominance displays. And at least in theory, it's real enough that they can't distinguish it from the real thing. If we have this technology - why are we wasting it on lizard-snakes?? Where's my robot girlfriend?
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
"But what will happen if a female tuatara discovers that the robot is an impostor?"
Satisfaction guaranteed
Yes, clearly Tuaturas are more advanced than humans. On the second page of the linked article it says that Tuaturas have methods of avoiding aggression. Humans, on the other hand, kill other humans over anything that will make money, like restricting the supply of oil to make more profit.
It would be so, if humans weren't destroying everyone's habitat.
The fact is, those animals evolved (via natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc) to live in, say, a jungle, not in a place where jungles are razed down and replaced with either a concrete nightmare or with farms to produce biodiesel/ethanol/whatever. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years, and those animals just don't get that to adapt to the new environment.
Even something as apparently benign as putting a road through their habitat can screw those animals big time, because they just didn't evolve the sense to look out for cars coming at 100 mph. Sure, they _might_ evolve that sense in another 100-200 thousand years, but they might not survive that long.
And then there's stuff where humans deliberately mess with the balance there. E.g., some wise guy decided to introduce rabbits to Australia, but without predators they multiplied like rabbits (if you pardon the pun), and squeezed the native equivalent (the Bilby) into near-extinction. E.g., then some wise guy introduced foxes, but then these multiplied like rabbits too because the native fauna just hadn't evolved the instincts to run away from a predator. So whole species were nothing but fox chow suddenly. And the rabbits just proved a little extra meal, helping the foxes pretty much overrun Australia.
It's just not the environment in which those animals evolved. We're changing the rules and the game there, and the animals just don't have the time to evolve a defense. The half a century it took european foxes to spread across Australia is just a tiny blip at evolutionary time scales. It's not survival of the fittest, it's a massacre.
It's, if you will, like filling your room with chlorine gas and then saying "ah, wtf, you should have evolved to the new environment. If you didn't, hey, not everyone must survive." Evolution just doesn't work that way.
And then there are species which the humans actively hunted. It's damn hard to evolve a defense against a species with rifles in the first place, especially since it's not a modification of an existing threat. And we've had guns, for, what? Maybe half a millenium? (And guns which also have a decent range and/or accuracy, for at most two centuries.) Evolution just doesn't work that fast.
If you want a species where hunting them was senseless too, take the Dodo. It was a harmless bird whose meat tasted bad too. It was perfectly adapted for its original habitats, but wasn't prepared for massive deforestation and being hunted. Not only it was hunted to provision ships quickly anyway (bad tasting meat is better than no meat, after all) and by the refugees, there are reports of colonists killing them with sticks and stones just for fun. You know, the, "haw haw, lookit the dumb bird who's too stupid to run away" kind of fun. It went extinct pretty fast.
That's really the whole point of these preservation efforts. It's species which we already know will go extinct if noone protects them, because we changed the rules of the game too fast for them to evolve.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Just as an extra random thought: evolution and natural selection never had to work their was to being a perfect defense. Yet with human hunters that's the only thing that would work.
E.g., the defense of rabbits isn't being too fast for any fox. Part of the defense is the natural balance of it all: if the population of rabbits declines too much, some foxes starve to death too, so the population of rabbits gets a chance to rebound. So some _will_ survive anyway, it just happens that on the average it will be the fitter ones.
When dealing with human hunters, that's just not the case. If the population of rabbits drops too much, humans will eat other stuff and continue hunting the rabbits anyway. That's how we drove the wooly mammoth, or the wolves and lynxes in most of Europe, extinct for example: even when the populations dropped dangerously low, these new two-legged predators just wouldn't follow the normal cycle, and continued hunting them just as fast and furious.
We didn't even have to hunt every last one, btw. Just push a species under a certain number or density, and from there it will die off anyway.
There also just isn't an obvious mechanism by which the fitter would have a significantly higher chance to survive. When a lioness chases some gazelles, it will generally settle for the slowest. Even being marginally fitter makes a huge difference in survivability. You don't have to outrun the lioness, you just have to outrun the slowest pack member. That's really what drives the survival of the fittest for a lot of species.
Another factor, and it works even for non-herd animals, is that you only need to be a less attractive target than some other species there. See how the european foxes in Australia preferred the native species, and only picked on the european rabbits when nothing else was available. So the rabbits most of the time could survive even while being the slowest in that group, because the fox would prefer a bilby instead.
With a human with a scoped rifle, it just doesn't work that way. Even being the fittest deer doesn't mean you won't get targetted just the same. In fact, for some species it will just make you a better trophy, so you'll be a more likely target.
Briefly, expecting survival of the fittest to work against humans... just won't work. Ever. Since the stone age we've been fitter than any species, and disproportionately more able to drive them extinct. If you go by survival of the fittest, then the only survivors will be the humans.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Can people please stop capitalising the name. It's Weta Workshop and Weta Digital.
A weta is a big fuck off insect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta
Also, it's pronounced Wet-a. Not Weeta.
Unless Tuataras are more intelligent than swans , this might end something like this: Swan loves swan-shaped boat (article in german).
then she'll demand to see the real robot, duh.
At the bottom of the
What's with the capitalization of the title? It's not like "WETA" stands for anything.
=w=
If they don't get it -just- right that robot is going to look freaky. Like some sort of zombie lizard... robot.
She'll bite his nuts off. (Maybe a few of his bolts as well...)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
and put some realtree camo on it!
They're using their grammar skills there.
"The tuatara, which is both related to lizards and snakes" .....
Even ignoring the bad grammar ("it" can't be "both" anything), lizards and snakes are related to one another. In fact, the skeletons of many snake species show vestigial limbs.
The same thing, I suspect, that happens with human females:
She'll be very satisfied, until the batteries die.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And a mighty ugly insect, too!
To me this is like asking Oracle to make an iPoodle.
Data! Is that you? "I am fully functional and skilled in various methods of pleasuring"
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
I just want to say that this is the coolest Slashdot headline I've seen in a while. All it needs is proper capitalization and punctuation:
And for best results, do a Magnus Pike impersonation when reading it.