I remember when I was little, hearing that they had no real recorded evidence of the giant squid. It immediately created this massive sense of excitement and wonder as to what else could be swimming around in the ocean.
I still to this day am in absolute fascination of random pictures that show up of creatures from places like the Mariana Trench. It just boggles my tiny brain that so much biological diversity exists.
Thanks for that. I thought it was rather strange for an article about video footage to have only two stills from the video rather than the video itself.
You want weird, search for it on YouTube. You'll find videos Ken Burnsing around on those same two still images, while people talk about how sweet it is.
I know the ocean is huge, but why don't we (or are we?) send hundreds of micro-robot vehicles down?
> After around 100 missions, during which they spent 400 hours in the cramped submarine, the three-man crew tracked the creature from a spot some 15 kilometres (nine miles) east of Chichi island in the north Pacific.
Because that sounds sub-optimal. Do you really need humans for tracking?
Well, how do you communicate with the robots? Radio waves don't penetrate water.
So say you have a robot that's autonomously floating around look at stuff and then it goes by a giant squid. There is no one to tell it "Hey! Look, a giant squid! Stop and turn your camera at that!" so it just keeps going.
Also, I have no idea how they would know where they're currently located (again, no GPS).. but I'm sure they have some solution.
One huge advantage I could see is potentially you wouldn't need to pressurize anything. Optics can easily be made to work immersed in water, electronics can be slathered in epoxy so you don't get any short circuits. Then there shouldn't be any limit to how deep the thing can go.
What about a fully autonomous submersible that surfaces periodically to get its bearings from GPS, upload data, recharge through solar, etc...
It could be programmed with a certain number of goals and priorities and follow the goal with the highest priority given some parameters.
Or, what about using low power radio to communicate relatively short distances to other submersibles scattered upward toward the surface, forming a mesh network that eventually has an endpoint connected to the ship or satellite?
Well, it's an autonomous robot. You only need to communicate with it on the surface. (Maybe some emergency communication feature is handy?)
You give it some kind of sensor. When it finds something bigger than 3 m at a depth of more than 500 m you start following it. I'm not saying that's easy, but we have self-driving cars and we send robots to Mars (average distance 200 million km). I'm sure we could do it, if there was interest.
It's has to orient itself in 3d space somehow. Wikipedia says the best you can get with dead reckoning drifts by .6nm/hr. I'm guessing that can be useful in some cases, but it probably limits a lot.
One needs acoustic signals for underwater communication. I work with underwater modems, and we use frequencies in the 18-34 KHz range. Other modems can operate in bands from 8-50 KHz.
Autonomous underwater vehicles are an active area of research. One of the challenges involved are localization once the vehicle has dived. You cannot get GPS under water, so one way to localize yourself is by tracking your velocity/acceleration once the dive has begun. Another way is to exchange messages with your peer robots and devise a distributed location resolution scheme. See some of the work done in my lab in these areas: http://arl.nus.edu.sg/twiki/bin/view/ARL/STARFISH
there are plenty of unmanned submersibles and they regularly produce new images, but it takes a pretty good chunk of energy to move around, following "interesting" things isn't easy to automate and wireless is a non-starter at that depth so they're all still tethered to ships/platforms.
if you've got something like a whale where it surfaces often you can do wireless tagging but that's about it for automatic exploration.
Come in Tokyo. Giant squid spotted. We have it in our wholly Yakuza-run scientific and diplomatically supported squidding sights. Target confirmed. We have T minus five to wok... T minus four...
You laugh, but biologists who study squid often do like to eat them. I've heard that at least one species is only documented in one report that includes pictures, measurements, and a description of how it tasted.
Japanese researchers discover giant Takoyaki in unprepared form.
Why is it always the Japanese researchers that study these yummy species like squid and whale? Is it that kind of research that ends with shipping the study probes to a high class restaurant at the end?
I still to this day am in absolute fascination of random pictures that show up of creatures from places like the Mariana Trench. It just boggles my tiny brain that so much biological diversity exists.
Here's a few that popped up on Reddit the other day -- http://imgur.com/a/xkfSv
"And lo on the seventh day, God slammed a bunch of shit He wasn't finished with down at the bottom of a trench and hoped that nobody would notice."