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Unmanned 'Terminator' Robots Kill Jellyfish
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."
What needs to be done is to destroy the fishing fleets.
We are living in the future.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I though jellyfishes would prove good nuke-plan refrigeration material.
Sounds like Philip K Dick's "Second Variety" short story...
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?
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
"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?
"Jellyfish removal scenario"... Personally, I would've called it "seek and dice program"
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.
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.
With the current craze about moon jelly fish aquariums, will this robot fit in there? What if my jelly fish decide they want to take over the world, I need some sort of defence against that!
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I think we'll all look back with pride when we tell our grandchildren how we served on the day our country called us.
First the robots came for the jellyfish, but I did not speak out because I was not a jellyfish ...
(Not sure if joking).
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.
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.
Lots of fish is used as animal food for the meat industry. Why not use jellyfish in the same way?
I've been led to believe all this time that nuclear power was the only useful baseload because renewables were intermittent, but it appears that along with "What if there is no wind at all across the country?" you need to have "What if you have a lot of jellyfish in the area".
Obviously then the existence of this electronic age is merely a matrix reconstruction since power cannot be supplied if there's a chance it can go out!
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 self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?
to detect the marine coelenterate and kill it.
I don't like the way they use the singular there...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Save the Sea Boobies?
They are called sea turtles. Or if not, then sharks, tunas & swordfish. Go breed more of these, or stop killing them off in such numbers and let their populations recover!
--Coder
They're called fish, and they're even self-replicating. Unfortunately we are the ones that keep terminating too many of them.
Man, I really hope jellyfish can't regenerate from a bud. Otherwise these JEROS jellyfish killer robots are a bad idea .
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Rumor has it that they are looking for a jellyfish named Sarah Connor.
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?
WARNING : you really DON'T want to look at that GIS link below. you have been warned.
yeah, apparently Russians are more like drug-addled zombies.
just say "HELL NOPE" to krokodil. really.
With all those jellyfish invasions lately I can't help but think of that book
Jellyfish attacks? They don't seem like they'd be the best at "attacking" people, but rather just floating close to shore and people swimming into them. It seems like people are provoking the jellies on accident and they're passively fighting back. Now we're setting killer robits out into the wild depths. What's next? Sharks? That would be horrible, but it makes sense according to the logic that if it attacks - kill it!
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
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.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I thought there was an article a while ago about Japanese sailors capturing those enormous jellyfish which would spawn every 8 years or so, then killing them and throwing them back into the sea. And it turned out that by killing them, it allowed them to spawn thousands more.
Or was I mistaken? I can't find the article./
So its like a big robotic egg-beater, or something?
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.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Fix THAT problem.
Doesn't cutting jellyfish exacerbate the problem? Saw a documentary about the jellyfish epidemic, and fishermen were cutting them up with machetes and dumping them in the water making the problem worse.
You're looking for Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story Watchbird , via Project Gutenberg. There was a TV adaptation in 2007's Season 1, Episode 6, Masters of Science Fiction.
Great read.
When these robots run out of prey, they might crawl up on land and seek out some other soft, spineless form of life. Politicians.
Have gnu, will travel.
Perhaps the killer robots are only catching the slowest jellyfish, leaving the faster ones to reproduce, ending up with swarms of super fast jelly fish, Ahhhh!
Jellyfish heaven is a lot like L.A.
Ehm, what species of jellyfish are they hunting over there? Unless I remember incorrectly that is where some jellyfish you do not want to kill by hacking them up live (ie, it will increase the numbers of some species)
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277
Japanese fishermen tried it only to find that the jelly fish pieces all grew into new jelly fish.
saw it on a documentary on discovery or natgeo a while ago. someone thought it was a good idea to fish giant jellyfish onto the deck of a ship, slice them up, and throw them back into the sea. sacs of eggs were spilled, probably jellyfish testicles too, spawning generations of new jellyfish. i thought the commentator of that documentary described it as a "mating frenzy".
Can't find the article, but Japanese found that mass destruction of Jellyfish by "blending them up" simply results in a mass of fertilized jellyfish cells/eggs. This would lead to a worse boom.
I was in Ganges Harbour (British Columbia) many years ago when a jellyfish bloom was underway. Rowing in a small wooden boat, I could see that the jellyfish were slowly floating toward the surface, then slowly floating back down. Each time one touched the surface it made a small, circular ripple. So many of these ripples were occurring, the surface of the water looked like it was raining, and for each jellyfish that happened to be touching the surface, there were dozens visible lower down. This was the case for miles and miles. The total number of jellyfish was unimaginable. It was like rowing through jellyfish soup.
Sounds like tribbles.
Jellyfish attacks? They don't seem like they'd be the best at "attacking" people, but rather just floating close to shore and people swimming into them. It seems like people are provoking the jellies on accident and they're passively fighting back.
There are jellyfish that can kill you just because you innocently brush against the meters long tendrils they deploy in order to kill anything that comes in to contact. That is not "passively" fighting back. You don't have to harm them, so the are not "fighting back". They are laying in wait to kill whatever they can, even if it is not edible or of any other use to them
First they came for the jellyfish, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't a jellyfish...
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
when it encounters a spineless politician looking for a high bidder?
Thank you for the link
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.