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Anti-Whaling Group Using Drones To Find Whalers
FatLittleMonkey writes "Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd is using aerial drones to find and track factory ships used by Japanese whalers. The group claims the tactic shortened the Japanese whaling season last year by a month, saving 200 whales, and this year they've spotted the factory ship even earlier."
I don't get the opposition to hunting non-endangered whales. The whales being hunted(mostly minke whales), are nowhere near endangered, so why is there just so much opposition to the whaling? Do these people really have nothing better to do with their time and money than harassing fishing boats? Maybe they should just get into Magic the Gathering instead, eats time and money like nothing else....
Also have these people actually tried whale meat? It's delicious.
Monstar L
By fishermen you mean scientists, right ?
There's a lot of people on the planet, and so a lot of time being spent by them, why does the small amount of time these people spend grate on you that much? What do you spend your time doing?
Tactically, a UAV wouldn't do the whalers much (if any) good as long as Sea Shepherd has one too. Sea Shepherd's entire goal is to find and then tailgate the factory ship; once they've done that then it doesn't matter if the whalers know where they are.
Now, if the whalers shot down Sea Shepherd's UAV (before it found the factory ship) then they could use their own to track Sea Shepherd and keep the factory ship away from their position, without "wasting" a harpoon ship like they've been doing.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Actually much of the whaling has been happening illegally in australian waters, and believe me, firearms would absolutely be the last straw in our governments very thin patience with these poachers.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
There is fuss about both of those, perhaps you aren't aware of it.
http://www.nasco.int/ for Salmon
http://www.tunaresearch.org/ for Tuna
And you forgot cod: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/greenpeace-ship-sails-to-save-north-sea-cod
And to be fair to them, while I don't see myself joining their fight, at least they have the balls to stand up for something, sure there are problems in the world, but most people don't bother addressing those problems either. Apathy, not whale conservationists, is our biggest enemy.
In other news, Sea Shepherd are a conservation group, they defend all marine species, including Tuna (for which they have been doing a major Mediterranean campaign). You should check the width of their action before pointing out “boo, there are other fish species endangered, so you get no points for protecting one and not all of them!”.
Interesting that while TFA is about clever use of technology in a space where it's not obvious, most slashdotters seem more interested in bashing the group of people using this technology for not following their (very traditional and anthropocentric) view of life. Nice.
No wit here.
And if the drone is high in the sky then just guns won't make it, you'd need some missile. Would whale fishing cover the costs of firing perhaps several guided missiles on each trip ?
Actually much of the whaling has been happening illegally in australian waters, and believe me, firearms would absolutely be the last straw in our governments very thin patience with these poachers.
Mod Parent up.
Public Opinion has in the region is around 90-10 against the Whalers, especially after the Sea Shepherd Stunt.
The Australian Navy has been requested to intervene on both sides in the last few years. Refused to take sides at this point.
General feeling is the Activists could prob take it a few steps further iwthout getting into trouble whereas the Japanese have pushed to the limits already.
Sonic weapons on both sides will be the next escalation step. However as this article is about communication and intelligence is vital.
If they know where the mother ship is they know how far out the whaling ships can reach and therefore act to drive the whales out of the way.
The danger comes where they know the Whaling ship has spotted a whale and is actively hunting it.
They will attempt to get in the line of sight of the harpoon, acid/gumsplash the harpoon mechanism, anything to stop the shot.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110513075522AAgInY0
Read radical news here
I'd be willing to bet that the minute the Japanese whaling fleet took a missile shot at the drone, the Australian navy would be all over them. The Japanese don't need that kind of bad PR at this point in time.
The waters they are fishing in are waters claimed by Australia but not recognised by Japan - Australia claim control over most of the southern ocean, well outside of the normal economic zone limits, and thus Japan has a valid reason to not recognise Australian control. Japan also doesn't recognise the economic area Australia claim off the coast of Antarctica, so once again the claim is in dispute.
It's hardly as black and white as you put it - and I support the abolition of whaling.
Here's a picture of the drone!
60+ years hasn't been long enough to "figure out how to make it work right"?
No. Not in our current climate of fear. It's a political third rail. Investors don't give nuclear a second thought. Scientists and engineers have limited funding. Many of our best minds avoid the field altogether as a dead end career. Who wants to be working in nuclear? The future is elsewhere.
(personal position: nuclear power could certainly be safe, but I've yet to find an organization I'd trust to not cut corners on something so expensive and dangerous. I've also yet to find a regulatory agency with better attention to detail than your average grade schooler.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Won't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure that our guns could reach higher than a drone could fly. Of course, those were navy main deck guns, and whalers don't have anything as big, or as powerful available to them.
What whalers MIGHT get hold of, are some missiles. Shoulder launched SAM missiles, if they can acquire a lock on the drone. Drones are rather stealthy, lacking a lot of the heat, radio, and/or magnetism associated with older and/or ancient aircraft. So - you rely on sight? Fly-by-wire?
But, when you get down to it, I think the Iranians have the best idea. Just use some radio equipment to jam communications, the GPS spoof it into landing on the water, recover the blasted thing yourself, and the Greenies are out one drone.
All that said - I do wish the Japanese would quit hunting whales. It's not like they are going to starve without them. Back in the day when there were tens of thousands of any given species, and mankind only captured a few dozen whales per year, things were cool. Today, the population is just to damned low, and we've become to damned efficient. Extinction threatens, and that just sucks.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Oh come now, no ships would ever be sunk because of a feud between a nation state and environmentalists.
Err, scrap that.
I used to be a whale, but then I took a harpoon to the face.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
Most ships would not be allowed in claimed waters if they had weapons. Its part of the strange rules that govern sailing vessels and make them prime targets for pirates.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
That doesn't really matter. Drones have the extremely desirable property of having a tiny signature in pretty much any field.
Tiny radar signature ...
Tiny heat signature
Tiny visual signature
Tiny audible signature
These things ... well they are tiny. Finding them is ridiculously difficult, even for advanced military hardware.
Due to earth's athmosphere (ie. the wind generating small lensing effects) the smallest object you can find from 100km distance is about 15x15 cm. That's the theoretical limit. Let's say you can get military hardware half as good as that, well then you can find a 1m x 10cm drone from about 400 km distance. Since drones fly at a stupid altitude (we're talking 50 meters or maybe less), finding them from sea level is not possible at all, so basically they'd need a plane in the air less than 400 km from the drone. And this is assuming they don't make it really hard (paint the bottom to look like a cloud, paint the top to look like the sea, use a light nonconductive material for wings and don't let the engine's heat leak into the structure itself. Or better yet : use an engine that's too powerfull, run it at really low settings, so it doesn't get hot in the first place. Not hard, especially in tiny planes).
(that's also the problem for terrorism using these things. Even over US soil, assuming the autopilot is not stupid (and the RC doesn't give it away), doesn't fly over bases and the like, the US military needs to have a spyplane will be very invasive privacy-wise. But once a few muslims figure this out ... the discussion is basically over, and the choice is between the military being able to see the pattern on your swimshorts in your own backyard live, or random explosions in cities).
whales do have really big dicks though
Isn't there an international standard of a 200 mile influence from a nation's shores, subject to negotiation of overlapping districts?
Regardless, the Japanese claims of "scientific research" seem like a flimsy excuse for the slaughter. Whales are intelligent, emotional creatures like dolphins. They communicate over vast distances. Just because they're not human doesn't mean we should be slaughtering them any more than we should primates.
They're too far up the evolutionary chain to be treated as common food animals.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Australia is the only country that recognises its claim.
Until we're prepared to send our Navy down there to enforce our claim, it's open season baby.
I have no problem with the Japs whaling for non-endangered whales like the Minke's that dominate their catch.
While sea sheppards were definitely harassing the whaling vessel with Ady Gil, it is hard to watch the footage and not see it as that the Ady Gil was rammed by the whalers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brw6JN0lQXY&feature=related
I think AAA is typically effective only to about 10k feet. Then again, a drone doesn't move that fast and probably won't evade fire, so it could be effective much higher. As you say we're talking about military-grade AAA here and usually it is only effective with lots of gun and/or very good radar guidance, and the guns are very large. Back in WW2 you'd probably have 1000 guns firing at 200 planes and maybe 20 of them would get shot down in a 15 minute encounter (though no doubt it made the attackers less effective all the same). Oh, and I doubt they sell proximity fused artillery shells on amazon.
I'd say a missile is probably the only reliable way of downing a drone. I imagine you'd need to use radar - IR might work once you're close. Manually guiding a missile only works on video games - you probably couldn't even see the thing until you're 200 feet away moving at mach 10. SAMs aren't cheap, and fire control radar is even less so.
Jamming communications is likely the only practical solution if the Japanese Navy isn't willing to send an Arleigh Burke out (as if they want the US Congress debating banning military sales to Japan). This is likely to be much more effective against a Greenpeace drone as they probably don't use satellite communication. If they do, another option (that won't make you many friends) is jamming the satellite, or convincing the operator to cut them off. I doubt commercial satellites are equipped to handle decent jamming.
And if the drone is high in the sky then just guns won't make it, you'd need some missile. Would whale fishing cover the costs of firing perhaps several guided missiles on each trip ?
Not a guided missile. A harpoon with an EMP payload on it.
Won't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure that our guns could reach higher than a drone could fly.
Predators and Reapers fly at around 25k feet. Don't think your gun is going to get there accurately, if at all.
What whalers MIGHT get hold of, are some missiles. Shoulder launched SAM missiles, if they can acquire a lock on the drone.
So lets assume a smaller drone, not a Predator. Something the size of your car, at 10k feet. The typical shoulder fired SAM, Strela SA-7. Passive infrared, and with a ceiling of 2.3km (7,500 feet), you're not going to be hitting a little drone anytime soon. Especially since you don't even know its there.
Did you see the same video as the rest of us AC ? The engines were obviously on it was pushing water and you can can see its wake once it started getting closer.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
So are the Oz folks willing to keep the activists under control as well? If they're not, then they're not doing their goddamned job. I'm no fan of poachers, but this vigilante mentality that it's somehow okay for the Sea Shepherd nutters to run amok when they're doing something politically correct yet illegal is a crock of crap.
Ripped from Wikipedia:
According to its mission statement, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society "uses innovative direct-action tactics to investigate, document, and take action when necessary to expose and confront illegal activities on the high seas". Those actions have included scuttling and disabling commercial whaling vessels at harbor, ramming other vessels, throwing glass bottles of butyric acid on the decks of vessels at sea, boarding of whaling vessels while at sea, and seizure and destruction of drift nets at sea. As of 2009, Paul Watson has said that the organization has sunk ten whaling ships while also destroying millions of dollars worth of equipment. Their practice of attacking and sinking other ships has led to reports of injuries to other sailors as well as the Sea Shepherd crew, including concussions and complications from chemical attacks.
--snip-
Ramming? Really? I'm no fan of the poachers, but I will say that it wouldn't be a stretch to get a hold of some surplus RPGs and explain it to a couple of Sea Shepherd vessels. Would I stand down to the Australian Navy or whatever their coast guard is called? Sure. Some independent ban of loons ramming my ship? Not likely. These fuckers are no different than the ELF or ALF.
Leave the policing of bad guys to nation-states and their organizations... otherwise don't cry when the poachers get annoyed and start to escalate. With two major wars winding down there are going to be plenty of surplus mercs on the market willing to do bad things to people.
Besides, the drone has to be able to reach escape velocity so that it can monitor the whalers on the moon. No missile can possibly catch that....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
While sea sheppards were definitely harassing the whaling vessel with Ady Gil, it is hard to watch the footage and not see it as that the Ady Gil was rammed by the whalers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brw6JN0lQXY&feature=related
I just watched the videos and it's not clear to me one way or another.
It is clear that the Ady Gil was under power, though moving slowly, while the whaler was moving at a good clip. It's also clear that the whaler wasn't at all upset about having collided with the Ady Gil. I don't see any evidence that either boat made any attempt to change course or speed.
I think it was a game of chicken. Either side could have blinked, but neither did. The captain of the Ady Gil thought the whaler would blink, in order to avoid an incident. The captain of the whaler thought the Ady Gil would blink, because it was obvious that a collision between the 13-ton composite-hulled Ady Gil and the 628-ton steel-hulled Shonan Maru 2 would destroy the trimaran and do nothing to the whaler. I also suspect that both hoped for a collision: the Ady Gil in order to create an incident, and the Shonan Maru 2 in order to crush a pest.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
those are not australia's waters. australia's grandiose claims are not accepted by the international community. there is no poaching, just hunting in international waters.
Think my numbers are off by a lot? I'll be happy to read any citations you might find on the subject. But, no matter what numbers we might find, we'll just come back to the fact that in olden days, iron men in wooden ships went out to take a modest number of whales from the sea. Today, men go out in huge iron factory ships to process entire pods of whales.
By 1500 most of the desirable whales in the Bay of Biscay were gone. The large sailing ships ventured further and further away – as far as Newfoundland.
However, by the early 1600 and 1700s commercial merchant ship owners realized the profits of the whaling trade and a shift began toward large scale whaling by companies.
1500-1800, Europeans (Dutch, English, Basques, etc) were actively fishing the Atlantic, and not just single ships, but fleets of a couple dozen or more.
We have been doing this for a long, long time.
Really? Ever own a cat. They have brains the size of a walnut yet each has their own personality. Mine would pout if they wanted to be close and I pushed them away. They'd play tricks on me. They knew when I didn't feel well, their behavior changed.
It used to be that people owning slaves in the South thought of them as farm animals as well, devoid of intelligent thought. If you have it drilled into you that other creatures are nothing more than automatons, then you will treat them like that regardless.
(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed:
(i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft;
(ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;