Jellyfish rigged for scientific missions
WASHINGTON: It may sound more like science fiction than fact, but researchers have created bionic jellyfish by embedding microelectronics into the marine invertebrates with hopes to deploy them to monitor and explore the world’s oceans.
A small prosthetic enabled the jellyfish to swim three times faster and more efficiently without causing any apparent stress to the animals, which have no brain, central nervous system or pain receptors, researchers said.
The next step would be to test ways to control where the jellyfish go and develop tiny sensors that could perform longterm measurements of ocean conditions such as temperature, salinity, acidity, oxygen levels, nutrients and microbial communities.
Researchers even envisioned installing minuscule cameras.
‘‘It’s very scifi futuristic,’’ said Stanford University bioengineer Nicole Xu, coauthor of the research published this week in the journal Science Advances.
‘‘We could send these bionic jellyfish to different areas of the ocean to monitor signs of climate change or observe natural phenomena.’’
An initial goal would be deep dives because measurements at great depths were a major gap in scientific understanding of oceans, California Institute of Technology mechanical engineering professor John Dabiri, the study’s other coauthor, said.
‘‘Basically, we’d release the bionic jellyfish at the surface, have it swim down to increasing depths, and see just how far we can get it to go down into the ocean and still make it back to the surface with data.’’
The study involved a common type of jellyfish called moon jellyfish, which had a diameter of 10cm20cm.
Jellyfish propel themselves through the water by contracting their muscles to collapse their umbrellashaped body, and then relaxing. The prosthetic — basically a chip, battery and electrodes that stimulate the muscles — would cause the jellyfish to pulse their bodies more frequently, akin to how a pacemaker regulates heart rate.
The prosthetic was 2cm in diameter.
Jellyfish are known to secrete mucus when stressed. No such reaction occurred during the research and the animals swam normally after the prosthetic was removed, the researchers said.
‘‘Care is taken not to harm the jellyfish,’’ Dabiri said.
There were many existing technologies to study the ocean near the surface including satellites and robotic sailboats called saildrones.
However, knowledge of the ocean declined at depths greater than about 20m, where researchers had to rely either on instruments deployed from ships — which were costly to operate — or use smaller underwater vehicles typically limited to daylong operation due to energystorage, Dabiri added.
‘‘Jellyfish have existed for over 500 million years, and over that time, their body structure has remained largely unchanged, so it’s interesting to figure out what makes them so special and how we can learn from them,’’ Xu said.
‘‘Because we use animals with natural swimming motions, the hope is that they won’t disturb the environment in the same way that a submarine might, so we can expand the types of environments we can monitor,’’ she added.