January 13 (UPI) – In a first-of-its-kind proof-of-concept study, scientists have used an independent fleet of robots to detect and study a community of microbes in the open ocean.
Marine microbes make up about half of the planet’s supply of oxygen and contain the largest amounts of carbon dioxide. Ocean microbes also form the basis for all seafood sequences.
In the open ocean, communities of microscopic algae, or phytoplankton, rely on currents to provide vital nutrients.
When the beaches of the open ocean – complex currents that can stretch for more than 60 miles – spin counterclockwise in the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere, they provide particularly rich concentrations of nutrients. from the depths of the oceans to the surface.
Most microphone communities in the open ocean thrive in a layer just below the surface known as the highest chlorophyll level. In the DCM, microbes have access to sunlight from above and nutrients from below.
To better understand the link between microbes and eddies, researchers successfully programmed a program of automated robots to perform microbial analysis from within the DCM.
Scientists described the feat in a new paper, published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.
“The research challenge facing our interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers was to find a way to enable a team of robots – to communicate with us and with each other – to be tracking and sampling the DCM, “study co – author Brett Hobson, a senior mechanical engineer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, said in a press release.
Monitoring microbes in the DCM with satellites and vessel sensors is very difficult, researchers said. Eddies and other streams are constantly going against the subterranean layer and the DCM can move directly by hundreds of feet in just a few hours.
“Open ocean eddies can have a major impact on microbes, but so far we have not been able to see them in this mobile reference framework,” said co-author Ed DeLong, a group professor at the University of Hawaii, Mānoa.
After discovering a powerful eddy north of the Hawaiian Islands, researchers released their three high-tech robots: two long-range independent underwater vehicles and a Wave Glider surface vehicle.
One of the two underwater robots, named Aku, was asked to sample and analyze genetic material and proteins from the microphone communities found in the mobile, eddy-shaped DCM.
At the same time, a second underwater robot, called Opah, surrounded Aku collecting data on the environmental conditions within the DCM.
The Wave Glider surface vehicle used sonar to hold tapes on Aku, while Opah appeared from time to time to provide data to the Wave Glider, which provided scientists with the observations on a nearby research vessel. on hand.
“This work is certainly the realization of a vision that will last for decades,” said Chris Scholin, president and CEO of MBARI, who began developing autonomous sampling technologies while a western researcher. at the research institute.
“Coordinating a robotic fleet to show how microphone communities react to changing situations is a game changer when it comes to group analysis,” Scholin said.
The data collected by the two underwater robots successfully showed that Aku maintained its position inside the DCM, even as the fold moved as much as 118 feet in less than four hours.
“Building a LRAUV with a unified ESP that could track this feature was a milestone,” said Yanwu Zhang, senior research engineer at MBARI and lead author of this study.
“Combining that sampling power with the flexibility of three different robots working together over the course of the test is an important engineering and operational achievement,” Zhang said.
Researchers hope to adapt the new technology for marine microbial detection to analyze other sea onions, including harmful algal blooms and oil spills.
“With the rapid changes our ocean is undergoing as a result of human activity such as climate change, pollution and overfishing, this technology has the potential to transform our potential for ocean health. understand and predict, “said Scholin.