The grandest migration on Earth isn’t the journey of some herbivore in Africa or a bird in the sky, but the vertical movement of whole ecosystems

A Clever Robot Spies on Creatures in the Ocean's ‘Twilight Zone’

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2021-06-17 08:00:04

The grandest migration on Earth isn’t the journey of some herbivore in Africa or a bird in the sky, but the vertical movement of whole ecosystems in the open ocean. All kinds of animals, from fish to crustaceans, hang out in the depths during the day, where the darkness provides protection from predators. At night, they migrate up to the shallows to forage. Then they swim back down again when the sun rises—a great big conveyor belt of biomass.

But now a spy swims among them: Mesobot. Today in the journal Science Robotics, a team of engineers and oceanographers describes how they got a new autonomous underwater vehicle to lock onto movements of organisms and follow them around the ocean’s “twilight zone,” a chronically understudied band between 650 feet and 3,200 feet deep, which scientists also refer to as mid-water. Thanks to some clever engineering, the researchers did so without flustering these highly sensitive animals, making Mesobot a groundbreaking new tool for oceanographers.

“It’s super cool from an engineering standpoint,” says Northeastern University roboticist Hanumant Singh, who develops ocean robots but wasn’t involved in this research. “It's really an amazing piece of work, in terms of looking at an area that's unexplored in the ocean.”