"This summer, a new underwater robot will start tracking some of the ocean's top predators — including great white sharks — to learn more about their habits.
Sharks receive more media attention than the average fish, but marine scientists still don't know much about how they live. Researchers often rely on anecdotal reports from commercial fishermen to understand the range and behavior of fish. But the shark industry is relatively small, so anecdotal information is scarce.
Biologist Chris Lowe from California State University Long Beach and engineer Chris Clark from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA have been developing a shark-tracking robot for the past three years to learn more about the fishes' habits.
"Working with computer scientists to answer these questions is a game changer," Lowe told Wired. "It's going to let us answer questions in biology that we have never been able to answer before."
Marine scientists have used similar autonomous underwater vehicle (AUVs) to collect oceanographic data for decades, but the technology to simultaneously track a moving animal has only developed within the past three years. Other robots now follow penguins, fish, and marine mammals, but this is the first designed specifically to track sharks, Lowe said. His team studies a variety of species, but plans to focus their robot work on great whites. (Another group from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute is close on their heels — more on that below).
The team first uses hooks, lines and nets to catch a shark in the wild, embeds a transmitter tag on its dorsal fin, and releases it back into the wild. The AUV then follows along at up to 4 miles per hour, always lurking between 300 to 500 meters behind so as not to alarm the shark.
"Any predator is not going to be as good a predator if it knows its being followed," Lowe said. "We have programmed the robot to not disturb the shark's behavior…"
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