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Robots Could Solve the Lionfish Ecological Disaster (mashable.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Robots-In-Service-of-the-Environment dept.

"Lionfish are an invasive species that are destroying our coral reefs and fisheries," writes SkinnyGuy. "The non-profit RISE (from iRobot's Colin Angle) has a plan to use robots to fish these Lionfish and serve them up to us on a delicious, golden platter." Mashable reports: This was not as crazy of an idea as it sounds and Angle had already been wondering "if there was still a way to use robot technology to solve larger environmental problems and maybe more proactively than merely sending our defense robots to natural disaster zones"... Could, Angle wondered, a robot even do the job and could it do it at scale? "Spending half a million dollars to build a robot that kill 10 lionfish is absurd," he told me...

They started with fresh-water electro fishing technology and adapted it for salt water. The robot stuns, but doesn't kill the lionfish and then it sucks them into the robot. It does this over and over again, until full of unconscious fish and then rises to the surface where a fisherman can unload the catch and deliver them to waiting restaurants and food stores. "Ultimately, the control of this device is like a PlayStation game: you're looking at screen and using a joystick controller. Zap it, catch it, do it again, said RISE Executive Director John Rizzi who told me that a team of unpaid volunteers have been working on the prototype for over a year."
The fish-killing robot will launch in Bermuda at the America's Cup festivities on April 19th, where there'll also be a celebrity chef lionfish cook-off and other events to help raise money "to further developer, build and deliver these robots to commercial fishermen and women."

20 comments

  1. This is all Picard's fault! by freeze128 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Blame Jean Luc Picard. He hauled that lionfish of his all over the damn galaxy. That's not the correct thing to do with an invasive species. I'm pretty sure that is a huge violation of the Prime Directive.

  2. Robots vs. Invasive species! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is kinda like ISIS vs. Al Qaeda.

  3. An efficient robot to harvest fish? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What could go wrong with an efficient fish-harvesting robot? Commercial fishermen could harvest any fish, not just lionfish. The robot would need to be autonomous - not under human control else human greed (regulations or not) would decimate the entire fish population worse than the lionfish.

    1. Re: An efficient robot to harvest fish? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you want to efficientâly catch fish indiscriminately, you use a net, not a robot that stuns them one by one.

    2. Re:An efficient robot to harvest fish? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

      Commercial fishermen could harvest any fish, not just lionfish.

      This robot is only useful for reef fish, not open water where most food species live. Fishermen going after reef fish are usually capturing for the aquarium market, and they currently use dynamite or chlorine bleach to stun the fish indiscriminately, while destroying the coral. If they switch to robots, it would be a vast improvement.

    3. Re:An efficient robot to harvest fish? by C+R+Johnson · · Score: 1

      I like the idea. Swarms of underwater lionfish hunting drones. Or Zebra Mussels in the great lakes. Or Asian Car in the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.
      Or how about swarms of small farming robots scurrying around a cornfield picking pests off plants and digging up Gypsumweed.
      And Marching columns of robot ants marching over the mountains of West Virginia selectively pulling Wild Garlic Mustard.

      --
      The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
    4. Re:An efficient robot to harvest fish? by WalksOnDirt · · Score: 1

      Or how about swarms of small farming robots scurrying around a cornfield picking pests off plants and digging up Gypsumweed.

      I'd never heard of gypsumweed, but after a moment's thought it occurred to me that it might be a mishearing of jimsom weed. A quick web search revealed that it was, and that jimson weed itself was originally Jamestown weed. This is why botanists always use scientific names.

      --
      a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
  4. No! by nospam007 · · Score: 1

    "you're looking at screen and using a joystick controller. Zap it, catch it, do it again, "

    That's a waldo not a robot.

    1. Re:No! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what I thought.

      Now HERE is a robotic (star)fish killer!!!

    2. Re:No! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "you're looking at screen and using a joystick controller. Zap it, catch it, do it again, "

      That's a waldo not a robot.

      Ugh! When are they going to get rid of all human jobs, so we can all sit back and enjoy our lionfish meals? I like the spines.

  5. Maybe they can by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    developer a spell check too.

  6. Were you not just warned about this people? by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    Robots feeding off fish is the literal starting point for the problems in Horizon Zero Dawn.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Were you not just warned about this people? by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      o noes not the pleble killing robits!

  7. that works... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    until the Lionfish evolve their robot defenses.
    and then we have a bigger problem.

  8. Got three words for you - by sheramil · · Score: 1

    Manshonyagger, Mark Elf.

  9. RISE by mentil · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure I want to support a robotics company named RISE. Particularly if said robots are specifically designed to kill things.
    Oh wait, this is actually a Waldo and not a robot, with a human operator consciously deciding to do the mass fish-killing? Carry on.
    (Can't decide if I mean that sarcastically.)

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  10. They are yummy by Chewbacon · · Score: 3, Informative

    Flakey, white, and mild tasting. Kind of like a hog fish (providing you've had one of those). I've been saying for a while, if you want to get rid of them, give seafood lovers a taste of them. Their flesh is not toxic, that's the spines. Since they won't bite a hook, catching them requires labor-intensive spear fishing, but this may help despite the initial investment.

    --
    Chewbacon
    The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
    1. Re:They are yummy by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      how about bullets with strings? We can call them harpoons!

    2. Re:They are yummy by Xest · · Score: 1

      I'd honestly be surprised if a robot is any more cost effective than using human labour in many areas, the robotic advantage is undoubtedly in places with more dangerous tidal swell or at depths below 40m. This might be less true in Florida, but labour is much cheaper throughout large swathes of the Caribbean and many such nations would love to be able to profit from protecting their reefs. The biggest barrier I could see is that there is simply not a functioning industry to export them currently. If there were exporters available for these fish then there are many poor but skilled sustenance only fisherman throughout this region who would love to start gaining a serious income by selling them on the world markets.

      I've not hunted them myself, but I've been down with people hunting them in the Caribbean (I was just there to do some underwater photography and got some nice shots of people hunting them), a single person can easily pull in 50 or so in a single dive shoving them into a bucket. They're easy to find and stand out like a sore thumb, they're slow and stupid, and not scared of humans.

      As you say they are incredibly tasty, so the real key is the setting up of commercial scale aggregation of stock for cost effective export. I understand that many Caribbean nations now are slowly added them to their regular diet, but there is sufficiently large population that an export market is required. I have also helped prepare these, and there is a lot of undue fear about their poisonous spines - they're so easy to chop off harmlessly, and the venom they carry isn't even remotely as dangerous as many claim - you can actually drink it if you're so weirdly inclined, it's only dangerous if injected into the bloodstream. The stings will hurt you a lot, but they're about as fatal as bee stings - if you're allergic to them then yes, you're going to be in trouble, but few people are that allergic to them, just as few people are allergic to bees and end up going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. Some people don't even really feel the pain much at all - I've seen similar responses with toxic sap in Euphorbia sp., where some people don't feel it, and others suffer an acid type burning effect, it's quite individual as to how you'll react, but death is rarely on the cards - the only other way that becomes the case is if you get stung an awful lot at once, so putting your hand into a bucket of lionfish might do it, but that's about it.

      Given that places like Europe have done an astoundingly good job of over-fishing the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Eastern Atlantic to the point that places like the UK are replacing the fish in their staple fish and chips with god awful tasteless imports of often unnamed fish from places like China, it might offer a welcome respite to start shipping these things over to the UK as an alternative for fish and chips to cod and haddock bringing back the flavour that tasteless imported fish from Asia simply do not offer but that cod and haddock always did.

      I've seen the damage they do to reefs and it's genuinely shocking - the reefs just lose all colour, and many species prominent just a kilometre or two away on healthy reef just vanish. This actually has a knock on impact in that because lionfish devour the young of other fish, and are indiscriminate about it, it means that other fish stocks suffer so it has a direct impact on fish stocks of other species meaning less fish to grow up for us to eat - it's in the interest of fishermen therefore to back this kind of endeavor.

      It should also be made legal to capture and sell these for the aquarium trade across the whole Western Atlantic - it seems mindless that we spend time breeding them for aquarists when we could just take them out the ocean and have ample supply to sell them on from there.

  11. Unsupervised Killing Machines by michaelcole · · Score: 1

    What could possibly go wrong?