As climate change roars, the seas are warming too. Not being aquatic, we have difficulty obtaining good data on the deep. Enter a jellyfish with a chip in its shoulder
Deep in the ocean, trouble is brewing. We know that thanks to our filthy habits, combined with climate change. Plastic has been observed at the bottom of the Marianna Trench. Surface water temperatures are rising and eventually, though more slowly, deeper waters will warm too. The more data we have the better, the snag being we aren't aquatic. Outfitting marine animals with sensors also has a catch: they tend to go where they want, not where we want.
Could the solution to collecting deep-water data come from one of the more misunderstood animals on Earth – the jellyfish? Specifically, the moon jellyfish. And not because it's volunteering.
A team led by Nicole Xu of the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a method for guiding the invertebrates to swim in convenient directions. Their research, which tracked the animals' trajectory, was published in the "Physical Review Fluids" journal in July. "Think of our device like a pacemaker on the heart," Xu explained. "We're stimulating the swim muscle by causing contractions and turning the animals toward a certain direction."
