Tucked away on the Moss Landing Harbor, mostly out of sight except for anyone driving along Sandholdt Road, is one of the world’s epicenters for marine science innovation – the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
There, scientists and engineers are free to experiment with new ways to understand marine life while harnessing the organization’s considerable technological assets.
It’s that kind of creative freedom that allowed Jared Figurski, an MBARI ocean observatory engineer, to follow a hunch: could MBARI’s long-range autonomous underwater vehicles, aka LRAUVs, be outfitted with cameras and attractors so they could observe predators and prey?
“It’s a needle in a haystack issue,” Figurski says. “Predators can be very rare, they’re highly mobile, and they can be highly migratory. To adequately sample them, you have to be out in the ocean for a long time and at vast distances, which was prohibitively expensive before LRAUVs.”
Figurski started working on the idea three years ago. After two years of pilot testing, he was able to present it to MBARI’s management team, who agreed to fund it indefinitely, but at a minimum of three years. The system, called Piscivore – animals that eat fish – is affixed to the LRAUV and records hundreds of hours of video in deployments which are then processed by MBARI’s artificial intelligence technology and matched with data the LRAUV is recording.
The hope, Figurski says, is to give marine scientists reliable data on predator and prey ecosystems that are both dynamic with the seasons, but that are also changing as marine life evolves with climate change.
Currently, MBARI’s Piscivore system is deployed about 10 days at a time, only at depths of down to 120 feet. The system isn’t yet equipped with lighting and must rely on ambient light, but Figurski says they’re working on that.
The system aims to help resolve a longstanding problem for researchers: sonar technology detects biomass and acoustic devices pick up sounds. However, the picture is always blurred – what, exactly, is in the water right now? Such data could help inform not just scientists, but also regulators of fisheries, who are often forced to make decisions based on limited data.
Figurski says MBARI engineers are at work on a deeper-ranging vehicle that can go as far down as 1,500 feet below the surface, and that Piscivore can be deployed on that once the lighting is solved.
That would help Figurski learn more about the presence of salmon sharks and swordfish around Monterey Bay, something he’s taken an interest in – young salmon sharks, which look like great whites, wash up from time to time on local beaches. While they’re known to be abundant in Alaska, he thinks they just might be deeper here. As for local swordfish, he says, “They’re probably a lot more here than we think.”
Figurski believes that MBARI will fund the system for many years to come – the possibilities for gathering data are vast, and presents immense potential value to regulators.
“If they don’t have data, they have to make a lot of guesses,” Figurski says. “We can fill in the gaps. I think that’s going to be an important role of Piscivore, particularly for adaptive management – a lot of time policies need to change on the fly.”
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Correction (2/23/24 11:30am): This story has been corrected to properly name the technology Piscivore is harnessing—it's a long-range autonomous underwater vehicle (LRAUV), not a long range underwater autonomous vehicle (LRUAV).