Poison-Injecting Robot Submarine Kills Sea Stars to Save Coral Reefs | Hacker News Reader

Poison-Injecting Robot Submarine Kills Sea Stars to Save Coral Reefs

spectrum.ieee.org

84 pointsivank46 comments

The really incredible thing here isn't the robot, it's the poison, this thiosulfate-citrate-bile salts-sucrose agar stuff. It isn't itself lethal, but it's a culture medium for bacteria which are:

www.int-res.com/articles/dao_oa/d097p085.pdf

So the injection basically amplifies specific members of the starfish's own microbiome to the point where they not only kill the starfish, but infect and kill its neighbours.

That is highly ingenious, and severely creepy.

Countdown to "Indestructible starfish"

Will Smith.. the last man on earth.. in New York.. has to sleep in a bath tub, because everything else is covered in huge spiky starfish. He doesn't have a dog.. the dogs were the first to go.

Made into actual link to save a bit of trouble:

http://www.int-res.com/articles/dao_oa/d097p085.pdf

Thanks, and apologies to everyone for my mangling of the link when i posted it.

The poison is pretty cool for sure but the integration of all the tech here is pretty amazing. It's kind of incredible to think of all the complex systems here work together so well. When I saw the video all I could say is wow. It could be that we are near a "Cambrian Explosion" of autonomous devices like this. I was skeptical when I first heard that term applied to devices but this has me reconsidering.

That does seem kind of neat, but it still doesn't make sense to me. You have to carry a poison supply that will run out. You need 12 mL per starfish.

Is that really more effective than just injecting lots of seawater? You could pump in seawater by the kL, not mL, and you'll never run out. The starfish will surely die after all bodily fluids have been washed out with seawater.

The other idea that comes to mind is a needle with an electrified tip. Depending on voltage and current, this kills in various different ways. You can heat the animal, zap the nerves, or (via electrolysis of salt) fill the animal with either chlorine or sodium hydroxide.

Energy. Those are all energy intensive ideas.

12 mL worth of battery ought to be able to handle most of those methods. That's about break-even, but better because you refill the same way you refill the computer and propulsion. Charge the battery and you're ready for more action, mess-free. If you can do the job with less than 12 mL of battery, it's a definite win.

Water or electricity don't lead to infection in other nearby starfish, which is probably needed here because it's going to be hard for a robot to find and kill all, or enough, of them. Which at the same point is also something to take care of: I hope the inventors checked the range of starfish etc, so that this won't lead to massive starfish death in places far away from the coral reef being meant to be protected.

Robots sent by a more intelligent species to exterminate the population and save a precious environment.

I hope there aren't any extraterrestrials reading.

A process a little bit like that is a background detail in the book 'All You Need Is Kill' – which is the basis for the Tom Cruise movie 'Edge of Tomorrow' ("Live, Die, Repeat").

"All You Need Is Kill" is a much better title than "Edge of Tomorrow". They should have kept it.

And "Edge of Tomorrow" is in turn a much better title than "Live. Die. Repeat."

Imo, the book is a much better and more clever story than the movie as well, not just the title. But opinions may very.

And "the day the earth stood still" in the new version.

That movie had a terrible marketing campaign but I thought it was a really good sci-fi movie.

That's also the plot of Tom Cruise's previous movie where he'd been fooled into harvesting the Earth for an illegal alien tetrahedral species. Maybe he's getting typecast.

At least it's not as bad as Matt Damon who's being typecast as the lone human surviving with little hope on a faraway planet. Two movies in a row -- let's see if they can make it three.

The big threat to coral reefs is posed by ocean acidification and warming. In the long run, it's not about sea stars, it's about the very water in which corals live.

The gradual loss in hospitality of the oceans and the associated effects on marine life are among the most serious, rarely-mentioned environmental threats currently in existence.

We appear to be building the things that creeped me out 30 years ago. I remember watching a robot bug inject sedative into a person in the '84 movie "Runaway" [1] and feeling chills go up and down my spine (I was working on stepping motor controllers at the time and it didn't feel so far fetched). As others have noted here, other's might use this for more nefarious purposes.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/

When will we learn to stop interfering with the environment? Every time we prop it up like this we just end up creating another issue. Look at cane toads in Australia for example.

The environment regulated itself just fine without us.

Did you read the article? The only reason there are so many of those sea stars is because fertilizer runoff is providing them a ton of excess nutrients.

So fix the cause of that and let nature regulate itself back to normal.

Far easier said than done! Pragmatically, what do you suggest to do here? Lobbying your political representatives?

I agree that this, while clever, is patching a symptom, not addressing the causes.

I think you need to do both. The sea stars will continue to consume the coral until the problem is solved at the source, possibly for a long enough time that the reef is consumed in its entirety.

No offense, but why do you think you can come up with a solution after thinking about a problem for maybe 10 seconds, when tons of smart people are working on this problem and can't come up with a great solution?

The problem with fertilizer run off is that it penetrates the ground, travels very slowly, and leeches into waterways. Once the fertilizer and contaminants are in the soil, they move very slowly. Like a meter or two per year. So, right now, we are seeing fertilizer and contaminant runoff entering streams, because a farmer in the 1970s fertilized a field that was 50 meters away from a river. I don't think we have a time machine available to go back and tell them to not fertilize their fields, which is basically the only way your solution would work.

The other alternative is to wait it out, but the coral reefs will be gone by then, because they will have been devoured by the sea stars.

Can we fix the fertilizer runoff too?

In this case, there's no chance of the robots proliferating out of control.

Yet.

A weird thing about this article is that it doesn't mention what happens if you touch one of these sea stars accidentally: it injects poison into you. The poison isn't that serious (painful and nauseating but not deadly, unless you bleed to death, or attract a shark), but then you have to have the spines removed. Surgically.

This shouldn't have any unintended consequences, right guys?

We've been managing ecosystems for quite a while now. Them being underwater is interesting, but not wholey novel.

Yeah, and it has worked out pretty poorly for us...

Its actually worked out pretty well for us, less so the indigenous life that was already there, I'm all for preservation but the thought that we can out the earth back anything like it was 10000 years ago is extremely unlikely, there are 7 billion of us and that's unlikely to change, Garden Earth is going to become a bigger and bigger thing I guess.

From an ecological viewpoint or from a we-just-built-autonomous-killer-robots viewpoint?

First they came for the Sea Stars, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a Sea Star.

Pity it won't save the Reef from acidifying oceans or coal mining companies dumping ther reailing on it.

Right, for that we need robots that educate people on the environmental impact of their actions, and robots that inject poison into people who bring snowballs inside a government building as incontrovertible proof that climate change is a liberal sham.

I think a whole lot of people who are worried about environmental damage from this robot are not realising that even though it's advertised as autonomous it only operates for a few hours before needing a recharge and as such it can be turned off very easily if things aren't going right.

The ocean is massive. Even coral reefs are massive. A fleet of these robots (which they don't have yet) would take years to affect significant areas.

This is a totally different ballgame to humans previous experiments involving introducing an organism to do pest control in a new environment.

When will I have robots that can chase invasive Argentine Ants back into the walls and ground where their queens live, and score non-toxic mechanical kills?

I've had good success around my house with cotton soaked in a combo of sugar, water and borax, then shielded from the pets by containing the cotton within a pair of used jar lids with holes poked in them. If that doesn't work, try peanut butter and borax.

Did this last year. The ants haven't even bounced back this year.

Are star fish that worthless? I used to hope that one day someone would find some miracle life altering property they have that would make them commercially lucrative, which would solve this problem overnight I bet.

It reminds me of Bluefin's HAUV, though with the body of a torpedo AUV.

  > Though with the body of a torpedo AUV

Which is an accurate description of every other AUV Bluein makes.

So how hard would it be to modify this to autonomously hunt human swimmers? Pretty creepy.

In this case, getting injected with star fish killing bacteria nutrients is probably less harmful than stepping on one of these poison star fishes themselves...so the robots are actually preferable if one or the other has to live.

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