Underwater robot can follow marine organisms over record distances

By Sandeep Ravindran

An underwater robot that can function in the ocean for months on end will allow scientists to study life in the open ocean, hundreds of kilometres from shore. The robot performed its first experiments this month, spending almost a week at a time tracking algal blooms in California's Monterey Bay.

"We really think this is a revolution in vehicles," says the robot's creator Jim Bellingham, chief technologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing. "It changes how we do oceanography."

Oceanographers currently use a variety of underwater vehicles in their research, none of which is ideal for studying marine life. Non-propelled vehicles called 'gliders' can stay in the ocean for several months and are great for studying its physical properties,

but they are too slow and their sensors too limited for detailed studies of living organisms. Current underwater robots, meanwhile, are fast and have sophisticated sensors, but these drain their batteries within a day, leaving researchers with only brief snapshots of life in the ocean.

The new robot, called the Tethys, combines the speed of existing robots with the range of gliders. It's designed to pursue organisms while recording the physical and chemical properties of the water around them.

"The idea is to be able to develop 'life stories' of marine organisms by following them as they move through the ocean," says Bellingham. The Tethys will be only a little more expensive than gliders, which cost about $140,000 — cheap enough for individual labs to buy, he adds.

The robot's first scientific expedition included studies of a bloom of the toxic algae Pseudo-nitzschia australis, says John Ryan, an oceanographer at MBARI.

The robot has the unique ability to 'park' itself in an algal patch and drift along with it]. Once the Tethys had pinpointed the centre of each patch, scientists sent in another short-range robot for more extensive analysis, and the two robots performed what Ryan calls a "robot ballet".

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Todd Walsh / MBARI

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