Scientists from Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have undertaken a research program exploring the potential for drones to detect bonnethead sharks lurking in the shallows. The project is designed to test out exactly how reliable this approach could be when dealing with different water conditions and habitats.
Because of the inherent difficulties in recruiting live sharks as study participants, the team created imposter plywood sharks painted to look like bonnetheads. They then spent a year conducting experiments and found that the drones were an effective tool in picking out these mock-predators from above.
“Our surveys so far are telling us if the sharks are there and they’re less than a meter deep, or a little past a meter deep, then we should be able to detect them even when the water is murky,” says Dave Johnston, director of the Unoccupied Systems Facility at Duke’s Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina.
The team is now moving to test out this detection technique in different habitats to see if it works just as well. The ultimate aim is to set up a system where researchers can deploy drones to detect any kind of shark in any coastal area and, eventually, notify swimmers when there is a shark in the area.
“Here’s an opportunity for us to use some pretty powerful small computers on board a very small aircraft to take us into a real-time detection situation,” says Johnstone. “And that’s where we’d like to be a few years down the road.”
Source: Gizmag