Currently we rely heavily on Shark Spotters positioned at strategic points along the Cape Peninsula for shark warnings. What if there was an app for that, too?

The Shark Spotters are currently primarily situated along the False Bay coastline, and provide daily warnings and updates to ocean users as to whether or not it’s safe to swim or use the water for other recreational activities such as surfing.

Their perspective is still however very limited because they can’t actually see into the water like a satellite “can”.

Professor Barbara Block has led a team of Stanford University researchers and together they have come up with a novel solution off the northern Californian coast.

They’ve begun deploying a fleet of static buoys and Wave Glider robots to turn the waters off the coast of San Francisco into a huge Wi-Fi network to track tagged fish and animals – and most importantly for recreational ocean users: the Great White Shark.

Imagine sitting at home, checking the Shark Spotters Twitter feed, and then the Shark Net app on your smartphone or computer? You’d definitely be able to make a far more calculated decision as to whether it’s safe to hit the water or not.

Gizmag breaks it down:

Tracking sea life can be something of a hit and miss affair. On one end of the spectrum, you can tag fish and hope to figure out how they migrate by plotting when and where someone later catches them. At the other end, you can use sophisticated tags that act as radio beacons that satellites can pick up. Both methods work, yet both lack the desired degree of detail or comprehensiveness. The Stanford team plans to bridge this gap by establishing a network of static and mobile data receivers off the coast of northern California between Monterey Bay and Tomales Point. This network will collect data from tagged sharks, tunas, whales, seals, seabirds and turtles that will be used to correlate 12 years of satellite data.

The network acts like a huge Wi-Fi system and relies on cheap, long-lasting acoustical tags. When a tagged fish passed within 304 metres of a data receiver, the acoustic signal is recorded and uploaded along with a timestamp and GPS location to a shore station. The buoys that make up the static part of the network are placed where white sharks are most likely to be. However, it’s an axiom of science that if you already know where something is, then there’s no point in looking for it, so the network also uses Wave Glider robots to rove about the area to cover any holes.

The solar and wave-powered Wave Glider is an autonomous ocean-going robot built by Liquid Robotics of Sunnyvale, California. It made headlines last March when it broke endurance records by traveling unaided from San Francisco to Hawaii. The 208 x 60 cm machine is solar powered and uses wave power by means of a submerged “glider” to steer and move forward. With an average speed of only about two knots (3,7 km/h), this energy-efficient design may not win any races, but is acoustically quiet and gives the Wave Rider exceptional endurance with mission durations already clocked at over 400 days. This makes it ideal for cruising about looking for errant sharks and other tagged sea life.

South Africa has only just begun to monitor our Great White Shark population, which you can track for yourself on the Ocearch website HERE. And Discovery Channel has for the first time just recorded what an attack looks like from below – but more importantly gone a long way to understanding just how little time might exist when the prehistoric creature launches an attack.

With technology like this, humans now most certainly have a better chance at making a decision as to whether it’s safe to enter the water or not.

But above all, the researchers hope that the technology will enable them to build a far better understanding of marine life. They also hope to make the technology available around the world in the future.

Says Block:

Our goal is to use revolutionary technology that increases our capacity to observe our oceans and census populations, improve fisheries management models, and monitor animal responses to climate change.

Shark Net is currently available as an iOS app available free of charge at the Apple app store. Check out the Liquid Robotics website for more.

Thanks Sean B!

[Source: Phys.org]