Invasive mosquito-eating fish are scary and can nibble off the tails of freshwater fish and tadpoles, killing native animals as they eat the eggs of other fish and amphibians. Scientists have designed a robot to scare off mosquito fish and demonstrated that this fear can alter their behavior, physiology and fertility.
To combat the invasive fish, an international team of biologists and engineers turned to its natural predator, the largemouth bass. They created a robotic fish that mimicked the appearance and movements of a largemouth bass. With the help of computer vision, the bionic fish robot will attack when it spots a mosquito-eating fish approaching. When mosquito fish are threatened in the wild. Their body weight and fecundity showed a significant decrease.
"The mosquito fish is one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world, and current eradication methods are too expensive and time-consuming to effectively spread it." "This global pest poses a serious threat to many aquatic animals," said lead author Giovanni Polverino of the University of Western Australia. Instead of killing them one by one, we have come up with an approach that could provide a better strategy for controlling this global pest. We've made their worst nightmare a reality -- a robot that scares mosquito fish instead of other animals around them."
In the presence of the robotic fish, the mosquito-eating fish tended to get closer to each other and spend more time in the center of the proving ground, hesitant to step into uncharted waters. They swam more crazily, with frequent, sharp turns, than those that had not seen a robot. After leaving the robot and returning to familiar waters, the effects of fear lingered. The frightened fish moved less, ate more, and showed signs of anxiety in the weeks following contact with the robotic fish.
The presence of robots is a change for the better for the tadpoles that mosquito fish usually feed on. While mosquito-eating fish are visual animals, observing their environment mainly through their eyes, tadpoles have poor vision -- they can't see robots very well. "We expected the robot to have a neutral effect on tadpoles, but it didn't," Polverino said. Because the robot changed the behavior of the mosquito-eating fish, the tadpoles' tails no longer had predators and they were more willing to venture into the test site. "That's a good thing for the tadpoles. Once they are free of the danger of mosquito-eating fish around, they are no longer afraid. They're happy."
After five weeks of brief exposure, the team found that the mosquito-eating fish allocated more energy to escape than to reproduce. Male fish have slimmer and streamlined bodies, with stronger muscles near their tails, which they use to cut the surface of the water to escape. Male fish also have lower sperm counts, while females produce lighter eggs, a change that could endanger the survival of the species as a whole.
"While the mosquito-eating fish were successfully stopped, lab-grown robotic fish are not yet ready to be released into the wild," said senior author MaurizioPorfiri of New York university. The team still needs to overcome technical challenges. In a small pond in Australia, they plan to test their endangerment by using two mosquito-killing methods first.
"Invasive species are a huge problem worldwide and a major cause of biodiversity loss," Polverino said. Hopefully we can use robotics to open the door to improving our biological control methods and fighting invasive species. We're very excited about it."
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