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."

Comments

people = shit

[aliquis]

What needs to be done is to destroy the fishing fleets.

Re:people = shit

[pla]

What needs to be done is to destroy the fishing fleets.

Dear mods:

The parent post does not count as flamebait, quite the opposite, he has very bluntly and articulately identified the root cause of the current overabundance of jellyfish.

Humans can still fish (although we really should limit ourselves to recreational fishing, and stick with farmed fish for food production). But modern supertrawlers don't just decimate fish populations, they catch the entire population in an area.

You want to get rid of jellyfish, get rid of these floating offenses to biodiversity by any means possible. Ban them, sink them, make their crew pariahs. If the fish come back, the jellyfish will vanish.

Robots to kill moon jellyfish

[Sockatume]

We are living in the future.

Re:Robots to kill moon jellyfish

[Sockatume]

If they wanted to live they should have stayed on the moon.

Re:Robots to kill moon jellyfish

[DarkOx]

Actually Climate change will raise ocean temperatures and make it EASIER for ocean life to thrive

Some types of Ocean life perhaps, but not necessarily the stuff that feeds or even the stuff that isn't unpleasant to share a swim. The stuff we don't care for so much Jellyfish and tiny creatures that we mostly experiences as mats of nasty scum will probably take over.

If the temperatures of sea water rise much it gets more acidic. Other complex life hostile chemical events around surfer and phosphorus might also turn it into a toxic soup.

If some of the marine biology people are right the rise in sea level is going to be the least of what we humans experience as problems. I am not at all convinced by the AGW science, I don't support carbon emissions regulation and might not even if we had conclusive evidence climate change was a man made event, because I think we should be making the investment in adaptation at this point. We are already near 400ppm its likely positive feed back at this point with our without us. We need to be looking geoengineering and finding solutions to actively control the climate.

Bad idea

[ecotax]

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?

Re:Bad idea

[drinkypoo]

Wouldn't it make more sense to fix the root cause of this problem, that is, overfishing?

Heh heh heh. Overfishing. I mean, that's part of the problem, but did you forget about acidification? (Let's just gloss over nuclear currents for a moment.) The significant sea creatures that can tolerate it gracefully are brittle stars and jellyfish. Algae will do okay as well, but kelp won't -- the increased acidification promotes algae that competes with it. So you get a big soup of stars, jellies, and algae. Mmmmmmmm good.

As for what the jellyfish become food for, it's everything below it, like always. Unless you have a problem with bottom-dwellers there's no reason to complain about that. The real issue is what we're doing to our biosphere that's causing these problems.

By all means, stop overfishing, HAHAHAHA. But that won't stop this.

Bad feeling about this

[Arancaytar]

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.

The ecosystem is screwed

[Dasher42]

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.

The Great Robot-Jellyfish War of 2013

[Mystakaphoros]

I think we'll all look back with pride when we tell our grandchildren how we served on the day our country called us.

Who's next

[gdr]

First the robots came for the jellyfish, but I did not speak out because I was not a jellyfish ... (Not sure if joking).

Re:This Robot == LOL

[Sockatume]

That's just the business end. If you actually read the article, you'd know that the whole buoy-shaped contraption at the top of the page is the robot; it uses a camera to identify jellyfish and plots its own path to efficiently patrol through the swarm. It's an impressive computer vision and AI achievement.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-37374-9_38