Abstract
Current marine research primarily depends on weighty and invasive sensory equipment and telemetric network to understand the marine environment, including the diverse fauna it contains, as a function of animal behavior and size, as well as equipment longevity. To match animal morphology and activity within the surrounding marine environment, here we show a physically flexible and stretchable skin-like and waterproof autonomous multifunctional system, integrating Bluetooth, memory chip, and high performance physical sensors. The sensory tag is mounted on a swimming crab (Portunus pelagicus) and is capable of continuous logging of depth, temperature, and salinity within the harsh ocean environment. The fully packaged, ultra-lightweight (<2.4 g in water), and compliant “Marine Skin” system does not have any wired connection enabling safe and weightless cutting-edge approach to monitor and assess marine life and the ecosystem’s health to support conservation and management of marine ecosystems.
Highlights
Marine ecosystems are experiencing worldwide anthropogenicdriven change, including extensive overfishing, run-off population, pollution, and increasing global warming.[1,2] The ability to monitor and record various environmental and population parameters allows greater understanding of human impact, enhanced mitigation strategies, and the opportunity for systematic feedback to shape policy implementation
Rapid advancements in electronic tagging and tracking tools have enabled the research community to remotely study a broad array of variables to monitor marine ecosystem health and how changes in the environment affect marine animals
With advances in state-of-the-art miniaturized electronics capitalizing on the emergence of flexible and stretchable form factors to integrate life, device, data, and processes through Internet of Everything[21,22,23], here we develop a waterproof ultralightweight (
Summary
Marine ecosystems are experiencing worldwide anthropogenicdriven change, including extensive overfishing, run-off population, pollution, and increasing global warming.[1,2] The ability to monitor and record various environmental and population parameters allows greater understanding of human impact, enhanced mitigation strategies, and the opportunity for systematic feedback to shape policy implementation. Rapid advancements in electronic tagging and tracking tools have enabled the research community to remotely study a broad array of variables to monitor marine ecosystem health and how changes in the environment affect marine animals. Electronic tagging of marine life has provided information on animal behavior, environmental conditions, and geographical position.[3,4,5,6,7] At the same time, marine tags should not weight more than 2% of the dry body weight of the tagged animal to maintain normal behavior, physiology, and survival of the tagged individual.[8,9] Yet, most devices in the market are unsuitable for young specimens, invertebrates, or small species, because the tag exceeds this tenet.[10,11] While many studies have focused on larger species, such as Cetaceans, Dolphins, and Sirenians, attachment methods are invasive. Several studies have been conducted analyzing the repercussions of marine tagging, where they showed that the extra carried weight and the design of the tag can affect diving patterns, mating, nesting behavior, and swimming drag.[14,15,16,17] the current size of CTD (conductivity–temperature–depth) sensors limit the diversity of species that could be studied, and further technological developments are required to provide more comfortable animal-friendly tagging devices that are not invasive and can conform to the animal’s morphology
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