Seal-mounted camera recovered after 3 years on ocean floor yields hours of video | Hacker News Reader

Seal-mounted camera recovered after 3 years on ocean floor yields hours of video

cbc.ca

140 pointscurmudgeon2257 comments

I found this article[1] answered allot of the questions I was left with after reading the linked article.

> “What we normally do is put a satellite transmitter on any animal that we deploy instruments on. In this case, we didn’t, because we expected this (camera) just to be gone at sea for a couple of days,” said Lidgard in an interview Friday.

> “With hindsight, probably not a good idea,” he added with a laugh.

> The idea, he said, was to deploy the camera four or five times, each time removing it from the seal to get the data after a few days and reattaching it to continue the research.

> In this case, Lidgard said he thinks the seal was starting to go through the moulting process and was foraging for food when the camera fell from its back.

No video footage there either sadly.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/10/08/lost-seal-mou...

>allot

My god. This will probably considered a low value comment on here but the phrase is "a lot".

Crazy. Even on HN there are allot of spelling mistakes.

>Crazy. Even on HN there are allot of spelling mistakes.

Yuo messed an oportunity to misspell yur comet.

Because it's not required for the level of discourse expected.

More than our allotment.

It's almost as if English is not everyone's first language.

You say this but I know way too many people who have English as their first and only language who make silly mistakes. And when you mention the correct way to say/write something _you're_ an asshole. No, I'm trying to help you!

Your right in principal, bad grammar effects us all, theirs allot we can do too keep content here peek quality.

write* due* hear*

Fwiw, while we're being pedantic, do and due are only homophones in some English dialects

It never occurred to me that they were homophones in any English dialects!

* affect :(

The GP made those mistakes on purpose. The parent was adding some more.

Ahh, you reminded me of a classic standup sketch on youtube, titled: "The Impotence of Proofreading" IIRC

Allot is a perfectly cromulent word.

Relevant: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better...

On the one hand, yes; on the other hand, it’s kind of fun to watch, in real time, the same sort of linguistic shift that means that the word “orange” doesn’t begin with the letter n.

on the top of the linked article, there is a video embedded that contains some snippets.

Scientists missed an opportunity for a humorous "warranty void if seal broken" notice engraved into the camera body

"Warranty void if seal is missing" might be better.

"Remove protective seal before installing the memory card"

That and who knew seals could stay underwater so long?

And how is it the camera only returned hours of video after filming for three years?

You'd need a huge battery to power a camera for that long, as well as enough storage to match.

Let's assume something at the low end of the quality scale, e.g. 1Mbps 480p H.264; that's 125KB/s, or roughly 11TB for 3 years of video. Likewise, take 5W as an average power consumption. 5W for 3 years turns out to be around 130kWh, which is a large capacity even for an EV battery. For comparison, the largest Tesla has 100kWh.

Have you seen the movie Contact? Like that but in reverse

They don't, they think the camera fell off the seal.

My read of this article is that the camera was only turning on for short periods, basically sparse samples of time.

I wonder if the other seals notice something is off about the seal with the large conspicuous device on its back.

Probably not. The humans are 250% more intelligent and don’t notice our implants.

Wait a second... I sense an undercover seal.

Astrokelping

if only they shared the videos in these type of articles

Do you really want to watch a seal swimming for several hours? The video on top of the page contains some snippets.

Yes. There are many HN users who would happily go over hours of boring seal video. Several times.

To wit, my SO watches web cam of grizzlies catching salmon. A lot of waiting. I guess it's meditative?

Yes please. That's in fact what I came here for.

This appears to be the company making this and other animal-mounted cameras: https://www.cats.is/products/cats-cam/

If you browse around the site, you can find photos of them attaching cameras to whales, etc.

Why that camera has lines like this? Was it 3D printed? If it was molded it doesn't make sense to have those lines + paint.

Interesting nevertheless that it survived all this time.

Looks like machining marks to me. I doubt something like that would be 3D printed.

I guess you could say that it was a very well-sealed camera.

Dadun-tsssss

Why wouldn't it be 3D printed? Not strong enough? I assume it's a fairly specialised item and shape.

Even if it was initially 3D printed, there is a fair bit of CNC machining that goes into making it a final useable product

Oh yea CNC'd is more likely. A 3D print would never survive.

  > I guess you could say that it was a very well-sealed camera.

Well, it did fall off the seal. Though that's not very typical.

It definitely looks 3d printed, although the layer resolution is quite fine and the print quality is very good, and it hasn't been obviously damaged after 3 years in the sea, so I expect this is not printed in PLA on a home 3d printer.

Searching for "lidgard underwater camera", I found this blog post, which has more pictures but no explanation of how it was made: https://lidgardphotography.com/tag/sable-island/ - I still think it looks clearly 3d printed.

The domain name on the side is https://www.cats.is/

They have other cameras that are also clearly 3d printed, e.g. https://www.cats.is/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Croc-CATS-Cam... but they still don't mention how they're made, the page about their cameras is at https://www.cats.is/products/cats-cam/

These seals sleep on the ocean floor? Seems like tempting fate a little bit! Must be some strong evolutionary pressure not to just sleep on land.

Unexpected to me. As a seal, I like my chances escaping from a wolf on a rock better than from a shark on the ocean floor. I can escape land predators by jumping into the water, but I can’t escape aquatic predators unless I happen to be able to outswim them to some nearby land mass.

You type very well for your species. What type of input device do you use?

This way they can probably cover greater diatances. Could also be it's more relaxing to take a nap at the bottom of the sea with the family far away.

...but how? They have to breathe? How long can they sustain on one lung volume of air if they can sleep underwater?

You need much less air when sleeping, compared to being awake, and much less sitting still, than moving. Two reductions there.

If they can last even 10 minutes under, while moving, I'd think they can last hours while sleeping.

How do they attach the camera? I see that it has metal band clamps, but what do they grab onto? A seal's back is all smooth.

Looks attached to that mesh and the mesh was attached by some kind of adhesive. You can see the fur it took with it.

3 years of suffering for 19 hrs of video

Not even that, all we got was an article about a video.

A thousand words is worth a picture. Hours of video at 25fps means they owe us another 270,000 or so words.

There is no implication that the seal suffered.

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