News and notes about science
DON’T SQUISH THE JELLYFISH. CATCH IT WITH A ROBOTIC CLAW.
The ocean is filled with jellyfish. They form critical links in the marine food chain, some are immortal and others remain floating enigmas. Some scientists consider them and other squishy creatures similar to living works of art, and they do not want to kill or injure these masterpieces they are trying to understand.
“It’s almost akin to how a scientist would study a painting in The Louvre,” said David Gruber, a marine biologist at the City University of New York’s Baruch College. “Someone studying the Mona Lisa wouldn’t just cut a piece off and do some analysis on it. We want to get as much information as we can without harming the painting.”
That is why Gruber and a team of engineers and marine scientists are announcing a new invention for studying soft sea creatures like jellyfish or squid in their natural habitat.
The RAD sampler (short for rotary actuated dodecahedron), is essentially a 3-D printed, origami catcher’s mitt. It uses a single motor to fold itself from a 20-inch flat star into a 12-sided encasement, 8 inches wide. With it, researchers can gently hold squishy sea animals temporarily for observation without harming, killing or having to bring them to the surface. This sampler, which was detailed recently in a paper in Science Robotics, is part of a larger effort to design robots that aid in the study of our planet’s most mysterious habitat.
“You get used to the fact that there are these animals that won’t get described, or won’t get described by you,” Brennan Phillips, an ocean engineer and Remote Operated Vehicle Pilot at the University of Rhode Island and co-author on the study, said.
One day when Phillips was studying at a microengineering lab at Harvard, a graduate student named Zhi Teoh presented a tiny paper model of a polyhedron he had hand folded, like origami, from a single panel with tweezers under a microscope. After the meeting, Phillips asked if Teoh could make it bigger — to capture sea creatures.
Teoh overcame many challenges, including making it easy to repair, not reliant on too many motors, able to withstand the deep ocean’s pressures and gentle on the animals when it closed.