Cyborg jellyfish could help in the fight against climate change by monitoring the state of the ocean. As a bonus, they also swim nearly three times faster than normal jellyfish.
John Dabiri at Stanford University and his colleagues embedded electronics into live jellyfish so that they could be remote-controlled.
Jellyfish are one of the most efficient swimmers in the world. Dabiri鈥檚 team had spent years trying to replicate their abilities in robots, but couldn鈥檛 do so. 鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 very energy efficient, so we turned to utilising the jellyfish themselves,鈥澛爃e says.
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Normally, jellyfish swim by squeezing their bodies in and out to produce water jets that propel them forward. Dabiri鈥檚 electronics generate an electrical current which stimulates muscle contractions, producing the same effect, but 2.8 times faster.
The system is controlled wirelessly and for now only allows the researchers to prompt forward motion 鈥� the jellyfish decides the direction of travel. Jellyfish don鈥檛 have pain receptors and Dabiri says the electronics were designed to be easily removed.
Dabiri hopes to attach sensors to the jellyfish so that they can easily measure several aspects of the ocean like oxygen content and temperature. Increasing the speed of the jellyfish means that measurements at various depths or locations can be done more quickly, and strong ocean currents will have less of an effect on the trajectory of the animals.
鈥淭hese jellyfish could help us understand how the vertical profile of oxygen is changing in an environment. If we had a large number of sensors in the water, we could make those measurements at a high resolution very easily. This would give us data to validate our models of ocean climate,鈥� he says.
Science Advances
