Follow up post. My middle schoolers are tasked to find a way to reduce whale entanglements. They have two ideas and would love feedback 🙏🙏
Posted by washmyhairforme@reddit | whales | View on Reddit | 5 comments
1. Hydrophone and Pinger Integration
• This solution combines acoustic devices to protect whales. Hydrophones can detect whale nearby, it would send a signal to pingers placed on fishing nets or boats. These pingers would then emit sound signal to deter whales from approaching the nets or vessels, thereby reducing the risk of entanglement or collision.
2. Improved Ropeless Gear Design
• From our research, one of the challenges with ropeless fishing gear is locating it in strong currents, bad weather, or nighttime conditions. Our idea is to incorporate LED lights or bioluminescent elements into the gear to make it easier to locate when it surfaces.
We would love to hear your feedback on these concepts.
snug97@reddit
Is the goal of this project to actually build a working, real-world device that accomplishes these things, or to do a class presentation about what might be possible?
washmyhairforme@reddit (OP)
The latter
Eternal_instance@reddit
Sounds good but whales have routes and already are affected in their travels by shipping lanes and noise pollution from human activity and construction/operations underwater. Nets and buoys don't stay in place. It would be better to put tracking on the buoys and activate pingers only when object deviates from intended location, coupled with a retrieval notification for humans.
Thick-Cartoonist-493@reddit
We don't have a "signal to deter whales." You could play loud annoying noises but then you just raise the stress levels of the animals until they adapt to it which they do. Whales don't usually talk in their feeding grounds so hydrophones don't work to detect them. Even if you do there is no direction or distance.
I don't know what lights would do at all. In their feeding grounds visibility can be limited to only a few feet even with lights.
ZakA77ack@reddit
These are awesome ideas and I love what your class has come up with. I'm a Marine Biologist from Florida and my first job was working on fishing boats. Maybe my input might be exciting to your class. 1. Depends on where in the world you are, but Pingers are actually already used on nets in the US. Specifically on gill nets in New England. I never saw any dolphins or whales get caught in Nets with pingers on them! Your classes idea was so good that it's actually already being used!
The biggest problem is that these implements are not always required, and fishermen do not like spending money if they don't have to.
Hard as it is to believe, some fishermen do not care about wildlife. Whales, turtles, seals all get in the way of their profits and create paperwork, problems, and potential fines. The one thing they will follow are law changes that have the wildlife protections baked in.
Hope that info helps! I can't wait to see what your class comes up with next!