With the majority of the Earth’s surface being covered with water, there’s actually still a lot about the ocean that we do not know. This is because it goes deep, very, very deep, which means that what we know so far could only just be the tip. Deep-sea exploration is something that many scientists and researchers are curious about, and it looks like they might have found a new way to go about it.
Thanks to the work of scientists at Caltech and Stanford University, they have come up with a way that could potentially allow jellyfish to help them with their exploration efforts. How they’ve done this is by using electrical impulses generated by a microprosthetic that would help the jellyfish swim faster, which in turn would allow the researchers to gather more data as the jellyfish make their rounds.
These electrical impulses have been likened to how a cardiac pacemaker would work, where through these impulses, it would spur the jellyfish to swim up to three times faster than they normally would. The researchers also studied the jellyfish to ensure that the creatures were not harmed and were not stressed despite these electrical impulses being sent through their bodies.
According to Caltech’s John Dabiri, “If we can find a way to direct these jellyfish and also equip them with sensors to track things like ocean temperature, salinity, oxygen levels, and so on, we could create a truly global ocean network where each of the jellyfish robots costs a few dollars to instrument and feeds themselves energy from prey already in the ocean.”