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The Lion(fish)'s Share: Robotic Aid Against Invasive Red Lionfish

In the warm waters off the coast of Florida, Bermuda, and the Carribean, a fascinating new member of the food chain is making quite a splash. Though instead of sporting the expected scales and fins, it's made mostly of plastic tubes and wiring. Being hailed as the 'Roomba of the Sea', these robotic constructs have a prime objective: ridding the waters of invasive lionfish. A lionfish: Image Credit: Tim Proffitt-White https://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_proffitt_white/ Lionfish (which includes 12 species under the genus Pterois ) are beautiful creatures, and have become something of a hallmark ocean species. While not known for their taste, they are popular inhabitants of saltwater aquariums around the world. The different species of lionfish vary in distribution, size, coloration, and so forth, and most are considered model citizens of the ecosystems they inhabit. However, when they escape their native ranges into unsuspecting waters, they can quickly overwhelm their new surr

The Big Whoop About Whooping Cranes

 

Whooping Cranes whooping! Image Credit: Steve Miller
https://www.flickr.com/photos/smiller999/

All stories have a beginning, and mine does as well: cranes. Not the tall mechanical wonders that we lift large objects with, but a rather odd (though still tall) family of birds known as Gruidae. Specifically, the Whooping crane (Grus americana). While the beginning of the whooping cranes' story is, unfortunately, one shared by far too many creatures around the globe, I hope that it's ending can shine a positive light on future conservation efforts while demonstrating the significance and utility of technology in helping to accomplish these goals.

Headshot of a whooping crane. Image Credit: Evangelio Gonzalez
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dgonzal111139/

The whooping crane is pretty unique. They are one of only two crane species in North America, and are the continents tallest bird, if that means anything to birds. They are mostly white with black markings under the eyes, and a red tuft on the top of their noggin which makes them look quite dashing. They tend to spend most of the year in solitary pairs, but get together in large numbers for breeding. They are omnivorous, and enjoy fish, clams, mice, frogs, aquatic plants, berries, and more, depending on the season. Their current habitat includes Summer nesting grounds in the Canadian Taiga, and a Winter migration to the warmer pastures of Texas, with another population which Summers in Wisconsin (okay?) and Winters in Florida (makes more sense). Their lifespan is estimated to be 20-25 years.

Now to the bummer... The cranes are threatened. Like, really threatened. Endangered actually. At one point, the cranes' habitat spread throughout the Midwest. Estimates guess that there were around 10,000 cranes on the continent when Europeans arrived, and about 1300-1400 by 1870. By 1938, there were 15 individuals comprising just one flock. But how did this happen?

The whooping crane, like other cranes, depends on sensitive wetlands and marshes, as well as the open prairies of the Great Plains. When settlers began pushing east, much of this land was altered, disturbed, or removed entirely to make way for farms and colonization. As irrigation became more common, rivers and streams were diverted and channelized for crops and to allow barges to travel far upstream, leaving previously expansive drainage ways and deltas dry and barren. Consider this beautiful map of the watersheds of the U.S.

A map using colors to show the different watersheds of North America. Image Credit: Robert Szucs
https://www.etsy.com/shop/GrasshopperGeography?ref=sh-carousel-2

Now imagine the amount of wetlands these watersheds would fill during the flooding seasons, when rivers (and the life which evolved with them) would have spilled their banks, fertilizing the plains and revitalizing the landscape. We put much of this to a halt over the centuries following European colonization. While habitat loss is a big part of the story, hunting certainly helped. Apparently crane feathers were handy, and their eggs tasty. We should also remember that around this time, European colonists were killing beavers in large numbers, often for the sole purpose of making the areas undesirable to other settlers (a practice known as Fur Desert Policy) So yeah. More info on river channelization and its' effects on ecosystems can be found here.

A juvenile whooping crane undergoing a veterinary inspection. Image Credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service HQ
https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwshq/

As the population declined drastically, people began to take notice. In 1918, it became illegal to hunt the whooping crane due to the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. In the 1950's a group of ornithologists, conservationists, and other bird enthusiasts led by Robert Porter Allen began working to save what was left of the species. Captive breeding efforts began in the 50's, though remained largely unsuccessful (out of 50 eggs by 1965, only four lived to adulthood and none ever produced offspring). In 1967, the whooping crane was declared endangered. Conservation attempts have continued ever since. We will circle back to this in a moment.

An adult whooping crane, with leg bands for ID and tracking, foraging for food. Image Credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service HQ
https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwshq/

The whooping crane, along with many other migratory birds, poses a significant challenge to conservationists. First of all, these things really go the distance. Monitoring one site can be expensive, but having to monitor every stop along a route that spans an entire continent? It sounds nearly impossible. On top of that, the birds need a fairly wide variety of different habitats. Most migratory birds don't hang out in wetlands all year, for example. The cranes Summer in sensitive arboreal tundra, take breathers on the open prairies and floodplains of the Midwest, and finally settle and nest along the warm Gulf Coast. While the Taiga may escape our direct touch for the most part, climate change certainly poses a risk to these massive forests. Many of the floodplains of the Midwest have been developed, or converted to fruitful farmland for the same reason the birds like them. The Gulf Coast of Texas has been undergoing intense urbanization for decades, and this shows little signs of slowing. Protecting even one of these crucial habitats proves challenging, and preserving enough of all of them for a large and highly mobile bird is an incredibly daunting endeavor. Check out this article in Ecology and Evolution for more information on the challenges this poses to conservationists. To add to this difficulty, scientists are unsure if one habitat is more or less important to the health of crane populations than any other. For example, it's unclear whether protecting nesting habitat in the Taiga will help populations more-so than protecting their stopping routes throughout the Midwest. This makes deciding where to allocate resources difficult, and somewhat of a guessing game. Long story short, this is no cakewalk.

A map showing the two main migratory routes of the whooping crane. Image Credit: Friends of the Wild Whoopers.
https://www.friendsofthewildwhoopers.org/

Back to efforts to save these whooping wonders. In 1976, George W. Archibald began working with a captive female named Tex. Archibald, an ornithologist (and in my opinion, absolute madman) decided to do something crazy. He decided to become one with the crane. He came up with a host of new techniques on raising captive cranes, most notably having the human handlers wear costumes to prevent imprinting of captive chicks (birds don't know what creatures they are at birth, and imprint on the parents to gain species identity) and use crane puppets to feed and interact with fledglings.

A researcher holding a crane puppet standing near a group of juvenile whooping cranes. Image Credit: Operation Migration
https://www.flickr.com/photos/operationmigration/

Beyond that, this absolute loon spent THREE years dancing, walking, calling, and whooping like a male crane in an attempt to get females in the mood. Unfortunately, Tex died shortly after hatching a single male, named Gee Whiz. The legacy lived on, however, and Gee Whiz went on to successfully mate with a number of females. After Archibald's groundbreaking work, breeding efforts improved dramatically. A single male named Canus became the father, grand-father, and great-grand-father to a whopping 186 cranes between 1966 and 2003. Since Archibald's work, the crane populations, both in captive reintroduction efforts and in the wild, have been steadily increasing. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration made some cuts to these programs in 2017. Only time will tell how this will impact the future of the cranes.

Whooping cranes and researchers inside a reintroduction pen. Image Credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service HQ
https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwshq/

Now what does this have to do with technology? I promise it's relevant. I first came to learn of the whooping cranes' plight while reading Elizabeth Kolbert's 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, which focuses on the sixth and ongoing mass-extinction (known as the Holocene extinction). In one of the chapters, she lays out a series of cases where people have dedicated extraordinary amounts of time and energy to solving a conservation problem. She outlines some amazing circumstances throughout history including the Sea Bird Preservation Act of 1869, the creation of the Endangered Species Act in 1974, and others. But one passage stuck out to me more so than the rest:

"The effort to save the whooping crane has involved even more man-hours [than that of the California condor], most provided by volunteers. Each year, a team of pilots flying ultralight aircraft teaches a new cohort of captive-raised crane chicks how to migrate south for the Winter, from Wisconsin to Florida. The journey of nearly 1300 miles can take up to three months, with dozens of stops on private land that owners give over to the birds." (p. 262)
An ultra-light aircraft guiding a flock of whooping cranes during migration. Image Credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region
https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwssoutheast/

 I was of instantly reminded of the 1996 film Fly Away Home, based on the work of Bill Lishman and others who aided in the migration of Canada Geese in the 1980's. As it turns out, Lishman was the main pathfinder for the first flight of whooping cranes in 2000! As I dug deeper and deeper, I soon realized what many other people have already been rolling around in their brains: if these people could do this with ultralight aircraft, what can we do today with modern drones and other technologies? Drones would likely be cheaper, easier to operate and are operated remotely, and could be better disguised to blend in with cranes or geese or whatever it is you're working with. As usual, it turns out lots of others have been working on this for a while. Check out this great article from The Audubon Society on drones and their impact on conservation and ecology.

An ultra-light aircraft guiding a group of migrating whooping cranes. Image Credit: Operation Migration 
https://www.flickr.com/photos/operationmigration/

Now let's push things a bit further. Imagine if we didn't need people in suits at all? What if we could make a robot that actually walked and talked like a crane? 10 years ago, you might get a laugh talking about this stuff. Now, I regularly show people the mini cheetah from MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Lab and they just say "oh!" Which brings me to my main point:

What was impossible 10 years, 5 years, or even 6 months ago, may not be so anymore. Moore's Law, the theory that number of transistors on a microchip (these make up processing power) will double roughly every two years. As a side-effect, many of the technologies which utilize microchips (hint: there's a ton) will also see similar increases in power and efficiency. Since Gordon Moore, former CEO of Intel, made the prediction in 1965, it has held remarkably true. But this trend doesn't happen on its' own. These increases are the result of human ingenuity, constantly finding new ways to smash more and more transistors onto smaller and smaller surfaces. In 2015, IBM was able to make transistors that are 7 nanometers wide (1/10,000th of a human hair). That was twice as small as the previous smallest transistors. So what is the underlying driver of Moore's Law? Carver Mead, Professor Emeritus in Engineer at Caltech, words it like this:

"Moore's Law is really a thing about human activity, it's about vision, it's about what you're allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible."
The 'Conservation Drone 2.0' Image Credit: Conservation Drones
www.ConservationDrones.org

So what's really going on, it seems to me, is the power of human innovation coupled with the snowballing effect of technological and scientific breakthroughs. The moral of Moore's Law is to keep pushing the boundaries. Don't just think outside the box, think as if there is no box, as they say.

Technology will continue to move in directions that will be difficult, and maybe even impossible to predict. However, this does not mean we must exist at the whims of a machine over which we no longer have control. We need to reassert our control over technological advancements and their impacts on ourselves and our world. We, and we alone, have the power to decide not only what we create, but what we DO with these creations. After reading about the whooping crane, and other environments and organisms in similar predicaments, I decided to dedicate my life to bettering technology to improve outcomes in conservation and ecology, and continue the accumulation of knowledge of which we are all contributors.

As I continue writing, I plan on including resources for further exploration, and potential ways we can all get involved. So with that said, here is a list of some further resources on whooping crane conservation, as well as groups doing amazing work, and some ways you can get involved!:
- Audubon Guide: Whooping Crane
- Friends of the Wild Whoopers
- International Crane Foundation
- Journey North: How You Can Help Whooping Cranes
- National Wildlife Federation: Whooping Crane
- USGS: Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
- USGS: Whooping Crane Restoration
- Whooping Crane Conservation Association
- Whooping Crane Festival

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