Herps
in the News
'Flipperbot' Crawls Like a Turtle to
Save Them
Eric Niiler
A team of engineers
from Georgia Tech and Northwestern University created a “flipper bot.” It’s an artificial
sea turtle designed to study how a baby sea turtles move across the beach after
hatching. They plan to use this to better study the physics of sea turtle
locomotion and to protect them and their beaches. Many beaches undergo nourishment
programs where they replace the sand lost from erosion. And if you get the
wrong sand it could slow down how fast the sea turtles can get to sea. This is
very important because there is a high predation rate at that short time
period.
In their studies they
noticed that not all sea turtles are good at running across the beach. Some
were but others seemed to dig themselves in a hole trying to get across. The
key seemed to be how they bent their wrists, but they had no evidence. So they
made “flipper bot” to test the bends of their wrist and locomotion across sand.
But since sand has some moisture problems, they used poppy seeds instead which
has similar characteristics as sand but without the problem. “Flipper bot” has
allowed them to study the locomotion of baby sea turtles repeatedly over long
periods of time.
Back From the Dead?
Brian Howard and Christine Dell'Amore
On a side not I came
across an interesting article that is a bit older, that came out last month.
They are trying to resurrect the gastric-brooding frog. These frogs have been
extinct since the mid-1980s due to habitat degradation, pollution, and disease.
What is so unique about these frogs is that the female swallows her own
fertilized eggs. Her stomach then stops producing acid and becomes a make-shift
womb. But scientists are now trying to resurrect this extinct species through
cloning. They had a few preserved specimens in Australian museums, and with
that they managed to make embryos but have not been able to get any further.
They believe this is due to how they are handling the eggs but work is still
being done.
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2 comments:
Interesting... maybe they could build an army of robot turtles to divert predators!
Very cool use of technology. Can they use this information to help turtle hatchlings move more effectively?
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