Robot Doctors of The Oceans : ESP
The health of the oceans and the seas is very important both for us and for the general life in the world. It is also critical to understand something that is so important and try to solve it by understanding the problems. Scientists developed small robots for this purpose and released these robots into the oceans.
One of the various algae groups living at the bottom of the oceans is plant plankton. At the heart of the ocean’s food chain, these creatures are responsible for the nutrient cycle in water and produce oxygen through photosynthesis. The task of plant plankton is also an important field of study for many researchers.
Any One of the two units of oxygen you get comes from plants in the ocean, and most of the time people don’t think of them because they’re microscopic, Beth said Bethany Kolody, a researcher at the Scripps Institute of Ocean Science in San Diego. The wide variety of plant plankton makes it difficult to predict how they are responsible for ocean changes and how their reactions will affect ocean health.
The idea of robot emerged after an understanding of the difficulty of observing plankton in the ocean:
Nutrient flow in a particular region can fuel massive algae growth. The change of temperature of water can change the distribution of accessible food sources. Vegetable plankton is needed to respond to all these changes, but unfortunately it is difficult to observe them while doing these things.
Al You need to be in the right place at the right time, Andrew explains Andrew Allen, an environmental scientist and microbial marine scientist at Scripps. Molecular biologist Chris Scholin, President of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), says the solution could come from labor a lab in a container ”. “Robots moving in the ocean” in Scholin’s proposal take the molecular biology laboratory to the oceans.
This robot, called the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP), was developed 15 years ago by Scholin and its team at MBARI. ESP was released in 2006 after the obstacles to be overcome for the robot to move in the ocean and take samples, and after extensive testing. The robot was able to analyze the DNA properties of the organisms it had collected and could only send them to researchers with a short delay.
According to Scholin, there are now more than 20 ESP robots used by various laboratories around the world. The majority are in the United States, one in Denmark and two in China.
Robots holding the pulse of the oceans: ‘Environmental Sample Processor (ESP)’
Stephanie Moore, an ocean science researcher at the Northwest Ocean Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, picked up one of these ESP robots and positioned it on the Washington coast where algae bloom. This toxic algae growth poisoned the crustaceans and made the fish sick.
ESP robots also helped researchers research the genetics of plant plankton. His colleagues at Allen and Scripps analyzed data collected by ESP from the California coast to see how various populations of microbes lived there. Moving in the stream, the robot collected samples from the same germ population every four hours.
Ody Ultimately, this population has changed over time and changes in the environment; We will be able to understand how it reacts to changing sunlight, changing nutrients, and interactions between population members.. “It’s a great opportunity for engineers, scientists and environmental groups to work together,” Scholi said.