Invasive Pisces can be a major issue for waterways , since they can devastate aboriginal mintage and take a toll on environmental diversity . There d shiner , for illustration , is a sturdy Pisces that can survive essentially anywhere , and in the procedure , outcompete and kill native fish species . incursive speciescan travel far and extensive , hoppingacross continentswith human aid ( whetheron purposeorby accident ) .
Colin Angle , who co - found iRobot , the company thatinventedthe Roomba , has an result . It ’s kind of like a golem vacuum , but for trespassing fish , concord toFast Company . The Guardian , developed by Angle ’s nonprofitRobots in Service of the Environment , is an underwater robot designed to stupefy lionfish , suck them up , and bring them to the Earth’s surface .
Lionfish , aboriginal to the Indo - Pacific , are considered an invasive mintage in the Atlantic and the Caribbean , where they have few predator and vast appetency for both crustacean and other fish . The fish can feed up to 20 other Pisces in half an hour , lay up to 40,000 eggs every few daytime , and live up to 30 years , making them a formidable foe for environmentalist . They may have beenintroducedin the mid-1980s by personal aquarium possessor in Florida unblock pets that got too big for their tanks .
As part of the effort to rid Atlantic waterway of lionfish , the U.S. government has tried toencouragepeople to bewitch and eat up them . If other species can be overfished , could n’t lionfish ?
The Guardian is n’t the only robot with a commission to eradicate invading Pisces . Queensland University of Technology ’s COTSbot isdesignedto kill jacket crown of thorn starfish in the Great Barrier Reef . Unlike COTSbot , though , The Guardian is n’t self-directed . Someone above the weewee has to control it remotely , directing it toward Pisces to blow up using a camera feed .
That ’s by design , though . The idea is that like the Roomba , the Guardian will be affordable enough for fisher to use so they can hunt the Pisces the Fishes and sell them in restaurants . ( One unit currently cost about $ 1000 . ) The Guardian ’s power to reach depths of up to 400 feet will help fishermen in waters and reefs that ca n’t be well accessed .
Each Guardian can bring up about 10 bouncy lionfish at a time . And while one automaton can not eliminate lionfish from the ocean alone , a huge telephone number of them could make a incision .
The Guardian is presently in testing in Bermuda .
[ h / tFast Company ]
