
Poison-Injecting Robot Submarine Kills Sea Stars to Save Coral Reefs - ivank
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/poison-robot-submarine?
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twic
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.

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milspec
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.

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dgemm
Energy. Those are all energy intensive ideas.

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milspec
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.

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onion2k
Robots sent by a more intelligent species to exterminate the population and
save a precious environment.

I hope there aren't any extraterrestrials reading.

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gojomo
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").

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

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

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johnloeber
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.

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smoyer
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/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/)

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thelollies
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.

~~~
oh_sigh
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.

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

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shoo
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.

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kragen
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.

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

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

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

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noir_lord
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.

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

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

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orthecreedence
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.

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adaml_623
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.

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gojomo
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?

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CodeWriter23
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.

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skc
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.

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

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dfc

      > Though with the body of a torpedo AUV
    

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

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

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lnanek2
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.

