2024-01-15 11:00:00
According to Voxreport, healthy coral reefs can absorb up to 97% of wave energy, slowing down the impact of storms, waves and floods in coastal areas. As ocean temperatures rise, coral reefs are facing increasingly serious threats, and may encounter ecological catastrophe within decades. Protecting and restoring coral diversity has become the top priority for maintaining ocean health. In recent years, artificial intelligence and scientific and technological progress have brought great progress to restoration work. Big progress has come.
In the underwater world, we often see clusters of tree-like corals. They are animals that mainly grow in tropical waters and are composed of many polyps. Coral polyps absorb calcium carbonate through seawater to form a hard shell, which accumulates over time. Today’s coral reefs were formed below. Although coral reefs only occupy about 0.2% of the seafloor, they provide habitat for more than a quarter of all marine species.
Although coral reefs only occupy about 0.2% of the seafloor, they provide habitat for more than a quarter of all marine species. Photo credit: Hiroko Yoshii／Unsplash
Corals are very sensitive to changes in ocean temperature and pH. Rising ocean temperatures and increasing acidity may cause corals to become sick or die. According to a report from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), a 1.5°C increase in sea temperature may cause 70% to 90% of the world’s corals to disappear. In addition, some scientists estimate that under the threat of warming, corals may become completely extinct by 2070.
Corals grow very slowly, and coral restoration methods usually involve cultivating small pieces of coral in land nurseries and then transplanting them to damaged coral reefs. However, this approach is costly and slow, and only prioritizes efforts to help endangered coral reefs. In order to save the impact of warming on corals, researchers from various places have developed many new technologies to assist coral restoration and conservation actions.
Robot turns into coral restoration expert
About 60 kilometers off the coast of Western Australia, in the shallow waters of the Abrolhos Islands, known as the Great Barrier Reef of Western Australia, scientist Taryn Foster and his team are training artificial intelligence (AI) Invest in coral restoration efforts.
The base, which Foster’s team designed to cultivate the reef, is a grooved, flat disc made of concrete with a handle. Scientists will train the robot to put coral fragments into small plugs and insert them into the base, and then put these chassis into the sea in batches.
The results of testing so far are encouraging, Foster said. “We have deployed several models of different reef structures and tested them on four different coral species, and they are all doing well.”
Scientist Taryn Foster lowers the chassis used to cultivate coral reefs into the sea in batches. Photo credit: AUTODESKPress release
Coral Maker, a new startup founded by Foster, has further cooperated with software giant Autodesk to train artificial intelligence and collaborative robots (cobots), so that robots and humans can work together to restore corals to speed up the restoration process. .
The robot is mainly responsible for some repetitive picking and placing actions during the coral restoration process. For example, the robot arm is responsible for attaching or gluing coral fragments to the cultivation base, and the researcher uses images to determine how to grab it. Even fragments of the same species of coral have very different shapes, so the robot needs to be trained to recognize the shape of the coral and how to place the fragments.
The next step for Coral Maker is to move the proof of concept (PoC) out of the lab in a year and a half. However, returning corals to the seafloor also takes a lot of effort, and how to do it without damaging the corals or the instruments remains a big challenge.
Training AI to listen to sounds for coral health check-up
In addition to assisting with restoration through robots, AI can also help track the health of coral reefs. In recent years, all walks of life have been devoted to the study of the soundscape of coral reefs. However, the soundscape of corals is quite complex, and it is often very difficult for experts to understand the health status of corals when analyzing recordings.
In 2022, a study published in the journal Ecological Indicators made new progress.Scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK are conducting a research project in Indonesian waters calledIn the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Project’s coral restoration project, they collected and recorded the sounds of several healthy and declining corals, and trained AI to learn to identify the differences between the two. The accuracy rate is as high as 92%, and it is expected to be used to track coral restoration. progress of the education program.
Ben Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Center for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London, said that visual and auditory analysis of corals in traditional surveys requires a lot of intensive labor. In addition, deploying hydroacoustic instruments in the water, especially in remote areas, is much easier and more economical than actually having diving experts actually descend to perform large-scale surveys.
Creatures or fish living in coral reefs may make various sounds of unknown meaning. Using machine learning algorithms, the research team uses computers to filter out sound characteristics (patterns) that cannot be detected by human ears. Through artificial intelligence, it can help determine whether the overall health of the coral is not only faster but also more accurate.
Innovative bleaching and freezing technologies help conserve corals
Another new technology for protecting coral reefs is “isochoric vitrification” launched by the Texas A&M University research team. Coral fragments are selected and frozen for preservation. The coral is preserved using strategic bleaching technology and liquid nitrogen. In the ultra-low temperature of minus 196°C, you will not get frostbite.
Scientists are testing “isochoric vitrification” technology to assist coral conservation efforts. Photo source: Cryopreservation and revival of Hawaiian stony corals using isochoric vitrification paper／Nature Communications
The reproductive period of corals lasts only a few days a year. In the past, scientists have also used cryopreservation to collect reproductive cells during coral reproduction. However, in addition to matching the reproduction time, the difficulty of accessing the coral’s growth location is also a challenge. The innovative technology developed by Texas A&M University can not be limited by time, geography, or the difficulty of maintaining precision devices in the sea, ushering in new progress in coral restoration work.
Scientists first need to “bleach” the coral samples to remove the photosynthetic algae that live in symbiosis with the corals. Then, through technology, the corals are stored in a glass state in a special aluminum container and quickly frozen with liquid nitrogen. They are then slowly heated and injected with seawater within 20 minutes to revive the corals and allow them to thaw. The coral successfully survived for 24 hours. This research is still in the preliminary research stage. The next stage of the challenge is to improve the long-term survival rate of the coral.
References
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