Introducing the Flying Fish Team

SPEAKER_04 0:42

You're listening to Women on the Reef, diving into marine science on the Great Barrier Reef and beyond with Tanya Murphy and Brett Wigman. Imagine you're a marine biologist carrying out an in-water survey on the Great Barrier Reef. You're armed with a camera, a notepad, and a measuring tape. You lay out a transect line, you photograph corals, you record depths and temperatures, and estimate the percentage of live coral, dead coral, and algae. You count key species. You look for disease, bleaching, and pests like the crowd of lawn starfish. Then you get back on the boat and the data entry begins. By repeating this process hundreds of times across different sections of the reef, scientists can build up a picture of its overall health. But it's slow and it's labor-intensive. Marine ecologist Brett Kettle has done countless surveys like this on the Great Area Reef over the past three decades. But as the threats to the reef intensified, he began to wonder: is there a faster way to get more widespread data about the reef? Brett is also a glider enthusiast, and that combination led to an extraordinary idea: an aeroplane that can fly underwater and survey up to 100 kilometers of reef in a single day. Critics said it would never work. But today, his invention has surveyed hundreds of kilometers of reef around the world and even helped discover what may be a new species of giant, famed carnivorous worm. So how does it work? And how do you build an underwater aircraft? What does it reveal that we couldn't see before? And perhaps most importantly, what could this mean for the future of reef conservation? Last November, I had the privilege of meeting Brett and the co-founders of Flying Fish Technologies and seeing the Vertigo 3 glider in action. I sat down with Brett himself, his eldest son David, the team's data analyst, and Josh Ridell, their mechatronics engineer. We had a fascinating conversation. So without further ado, let's dive in. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining me to chat about the underwater drone. I'm very excited because I got to see it in operation at least from above the water over the last couple of days, and it was really cool to see. So I'm excited to learn more about it. So can we start off by telling me about yourselves and your background and how you came to be working on this project?

SPEAKER_02 3:23

I'm a marine biologist and I have uh spent many, many hours under the water wondering how we could collect better data more quickly to answer pressing questions. And uh I was very fortunate to be able to take some time off about seven years ago and begin this process.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Yeah, I guess I'm the oldest son first, uh, and that's sort of how I got introduced to the project. And I guess what really drew me in first was the realization that in terms of the way we collect data at the moment, it's like cutting up a grain of rice into lots of little pieces and scattering it across a football field and trying to figure out what that whole football field might look like sort of thing. You know, it's just these tiny it's so big, yeah. And so we we we get all these little snapshots of data. And when Brett and I were talking about what could be, you know, done in the future and what this tech sort of unlocks, I just kind of went, yeah, I'm all in. And so uh now pilot the glider and help out with a lot of the ML development for for identifying species and all of that sort of thing, uh, as well as building out the 3D model pipeline so that we can see the reef in it in all of its glory in 3D on VR headsets and all that kind of fun stuff.

SPEAKER_04 4:36

Do you have a pilot license?

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Uh we have a bit of a training program, but yeah, maybe we need an actual pilot license for the for the glider. It's very different to anything else. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Hey, I'm Josh. I'm uh I don't know, the technical guy. I do uh yeah, all the software, circuit boards, um some of the cloud stuff as well, and mechanical design. Brett kind of does a lot of the invention of things, and then I I bring the engineering in and refine it a little bit so so yeah, it works reliably for the field. And from my point of view, there's a lot of interesting technical challenges from the glider. It's something that is truly new and different, especially to a lot of un other underwater stuff, and just in general, the underwater always adds an extra layer of uh difficulty and things that would usually be quite simple uh uh on the surface.

SPEAKER_04 5:30

So

What is Vertigo 3 and How Does It Work?

SPEAKER_04 5:31

when I first saw a photo of this and I couldn't get quite a clear view, I thought it was actually a glider that people fly for a hobby, but it's not. It goes underwater. And in case anyone can't tell, I think is this the camera at the front? Oh yep. And another camera here. Okay, cool. And there's uh circuits and stuff in this part, and then wings, I guess do you call them wings?

SPEAKER_02 5:57

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:58

What are those fins?

SPEAKER_02 5:59

Yeah, like tail, there are types of airplanes that have a V tail.

SPEAKER_04 6:03

So how does it work?

SPEAKER_02 6:06

The first the funky thing is, if you had a very, very windy day and a big hill, that would probably fly. Wow. It as in it flies underwater with all of the same principles that an aircraft does. In our case we have uh winger-ons instead of ailer-ons, and we have a V tail instead of a usual crossed tail. But other than that, it's an aeroplane for underwater.

SPEAKER_04 6:34

So ingenious to design it based off aeronautical principles. How did you come about the idea for this underwater drone? I know that there are other underwater drones that probably already existed, but as a marine biologist, why did you decide that you wanted to invent a new one?

SPEAKER_02 6:52

Even to today, and we're just starting to displace this now, but even to today, scientific grade underwater observations are done by marine biologists with cameras. Or notepads, if you're doing fish, you use a notepad, if you're doing rugosity, you use a notepad, if you're doing mandatoes, you use a notepad. So there's a lot of very, very manual stuff done underwater. And I actually am a pilot. I fly unpowered aeroplanes, sailplan. I used to do cross-country racing, and I and I also hung around with a bunch of people who taught me how to build carbon composite small aircraft in remote control. Yeah, and how they start. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I it just put it all of these ideas together in my head and I went, it ought to be possible to fly with such manoeuvrability and control authority that you can essentially follow the path of a diver, so just skimming a little bit above the surface of the reef as they swim along, but more quickly.

SPEAKER_04 7:59

So the amazing thing about this drone that you explained to me is that you can fly it really close to the sea floor to get really close up images, but then you can do that over a really large area. So you told me that you flew over more than ten kilometers today? It was how far did you go today?

SPEAKER_02 8:18

I think today was probably uh thirty kilometers. Um was yesterday, wasn't it? Yeah, ten was yesterday. I think our biggest days so far we had two days in a row at fifty-six kilometers in Hawaii. Uh but in theory, if we can uh just you know go without a break, we can cover as much as a hundred kilometers in a day. Which if you looked at the number of conventional underwater transects that would be, it would be a thousand or five thousand underwater transects just simply done in a day. In fact, I think when you compare the types of information that this thing can collect, it replaces manditou, it replaces fish counts, it replaces coral counts, etc. When you look at all of those things, as a general rule of thumb, each one of these machines can do the work of a thousand divers every day.

SPEAKER_04 9:13

So AI is taking our jobs?

SPEAKER_02 9:17

Uh no, look, absolutely not. AI is just um what was the expression that that we heard over in uh in JEDA at one time? Automatic idiocy. Uh and quite quite frankly, you can teach a five-year-old to do the kinds of detections that can be done. Uh maybe not quite, it's a bit more complicated with some of the corals and fish, but the notion of teaching someone to do something is quite simple. It's just that people don't have the ability to do it for twenty-four hours straight processing a million images at a time.

SPEAKER_04 9:50

So yeah, so what kind of data does it collect?

SPEAKER_02 9:53

Uh so we have a temperature sensor on board for w water temperature. We have an echo sounder which helps the machine to work out how high above the seabed it is, and a pressure gauge which tells it how far below the surface. If we combine those two measurements we get seabed roughness, which is one of the most important determinants of coral reef niche habitat, niche quality.

SPEAKER_04 10:16

Complexity, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:17

Yeah, yeah. Uh and then of course there's the vision side of it from which we can extract information on fish, information on corals, information on clams, sharks, turtles, there's a lot.

SPEAKER_04 10:30

So I just briefly saw some of the imagery that you showed on your phone last night and it was it was only a brief look that I got to have, but it you end up with this 3D model of the sea floor. How detailed can it be? Could you actually see individual fish and things like that, or is it a bit more like high level?

SPEAKER_01 10:48

I I guess it's a little bit more detailed than that, but it but in some ways it's doesn't quite work the way you're describing. Fish, anything that moves in the water, other than sometimes we've managed to capture some manta rays which are moving very, very slowly. But things that are moving in the water sort of don't work through that process. But I mean we we have some really beautiful models of some of the spaces that we were surveying in Maui where you can count grains of sand if you like. It's very, very detailed. Yeah. And and I guess you know what you see on the phone then is a little bit shrunk down, squished so that you can open those models off of a phone. But you know, web-based, you know, services etc. can render those out in all their exquisite glory.

How To Build An Underwater Plane

SPEAKER_04 11:27

How did you actually make this? Did you just literally make this at home in your back shed?

SPEAKER_02 11:31

W well I began by building the very first prototype by cutting up a bait board with a bandsaw and uh and grinding it into shape with a planer. Uh and then after we kind of got a bit of an idea that it would work, over to Josh.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Yeah, it's a it's a combination of uh a few different things. Where we can, it always makes sense to get an off-the-shelf part where someone else is managing the whole manufacturing quality control and all of that, even though you do pay a little bit of a premium for it. And then anything that we can't get off the shelf, we're using contract manufacturing for the more complicated parts where you you know some of these things you need relatively big CNC machines and casting setups, which the setup costs uh many times more than the few parts that we need. And then we also use 3D printing quite a lot, so anything that's not really uh doesn't need to be waterproof or particularly strong, but even things that need to be strong as well, we're using carbon fiber 3D prints as well. So that also allows us to move really quickly if we want to change designs for internals and stuff like that. We can 3D print and have something ready the next day. Whereas a lot of the parts are you know four to six week lead time once you order them. So yeah, you've got lots of different sources and managing lots of different manufacturing techniques, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

This trip is just a bit of a special trip for us too because we had a workshop where this all happened and the workshop burnt down, I'm afraid. Oh beautiful old timber building, but in any event, so this is uh yeah, tim old timber building, they're very flammable. So this has been fantastic for us to be able to be invited along here and uh be able to be provided with you know accommodation and boats and all the rest of it, and a good cause to to go and map these reefs with essentially a brand new machine.

SPEAKER_04 13:29

Yes, many thanks to Reef Ecologic and the funding sources that allowed us to do this amazing weekend of reef surveys on Ellison Reef off Mission Beach. We were there yesterday and today, and it was a beautiful day of surveying the reef, and all of us divers and snorkelers in the water could capture as much data as we could with our cameras. But then knowing that you guys actually covered 40 kilometers of reef in that space of time is is really cool, and by putting those things together, you know, you've got like I zoomed right in and got a picture of some tiny glass shrimps that are about this big, and then we've got your 40 kilometres of seafloor mapping, and when we put all that together, we got an idea about Ellison Reef, which was a really cool experience today. But yes,

How to Fly An Underwater Plane

SPEAKER_04 14:17

how do you actually pilot this contraption? You're the pilot, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

One of the pilots. Yeah, so we have a direct feed of data back to the boat, which is near near real time, so that we can fly it. We have the ability to log on to a Wi-Fi using iPads and view that view that in real time, Xbox controller for flying the the glider around. But that live feed also means that we can have, you know, whoever's driving the boat can see exactly where we are. We can have scientists on board who are able to look at the data in real time and make annotations against it, look at things that they might want to come back to, etc. But yeah, it's it that live vision feed, being able to see what's going on around you, you know, readings for how deep you are, what your altitude is, so you can try and manage that and stay nice and close to the reef. That's kind of how we do it. Sometimes it's really a relaxing kind of job when we're in more seagrass areas or over sandy, sandy areas. Uh, and then other times it's four or six meter you know, steep bombies that jump up in front of you that you have to navigate, and we're just lucky it's it's quite an agile glider, and you know, as long as we've got a little bit of visibility, then we can manage that nicely.

SPEAKER_04 15:25

When I first talked to you about this, I was like, oh, that sounds really fun, like basically playing Xbox, driving this airplane underwater, driving it over bommies and through canyons and swerving manta rays, sounds like Star Wars, and you said, Yeah, it's really fun for the first like four hours. So, yeah, you have to do it for a long time if you want to get a lot of data right.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Yeah, and and we we set the boat up to accommodate for that, so we try and don't train people for one one role, we train for a a variety of roles on the boat so someone can take over driving the boat while they uh you know someone else comes and steps in and flies a glider for a bit, that sort of thing, so that we don't get fatigue. But there are definitely a whole bunch of perks, and you know, every now and then you fly through a a massive school of fish, or um you know, today we had a beautiful encounter with a shark that just came and swam in front of us for a little while, and and some turtles and things like that, and it's just magic. So those sort of things take you from being you know a little bit bored or a little bit fatigued or whatever's going on into a well, this is a real moment, and this is the you know, this is exciting and this is why we're doing it.

SPEAKER_03 16:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:29

Yeah, you guys are really lucky. You've seen more of the Great Barrier Reef than most people ever will. For anyone that's not familiar, it is connected to the boat by a cable which helps you to drive it. And so other people have been talking about it today, feeling a little bit confused and saying, Well, if you're dragging it, why do you also need to drive it? Or if you can drive it, why do you also need to tow it?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

It's towed and as such, I mean doesn't have any thrusters or any engines on on board, so it's nice and quiet. That's one of the first benefits of towing it. Yeah, we don't scare the fish away, you know. Generally they don't see us until we're almost on top of them, sort of thing.

SPEAKER_04 17:08

But does the boat scare the fish away? Or maybe there's enough distance.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Yeah, we find that fish aren't too bothered by the boat, and also there is that distance. We typically operate anywhere from twenty to forty metres away from the boat. So um depth too. And and we are we are down quite a lot deeper than the boat usually. So yeah, and I guess the other benefit of being towed and and being an aeroplane rather than just something which is dragged behind the boat is that we can match not only the bottom profile and sort of come up and down, but you know, we can actually stand off of the boat as well. So, for example, in Maui we're against a a vertical wall, same in in the Gulf of Akaba, where we're in one, two meter swell, and the boat has to stay safely outside of that, but the glider can be pulled right in against the reef, you know, un underneath breaking waves and not have any problem at all. And the other beautiful thing about it is not only can it navigate left and right of the boat track, but it actually can roll as well. So we can actually fly, you know, natural to the ground slope, so as that reef gets steeper, we just roll it and try and match that so we can see back against the reef.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

I just add too that uh as a scientist, one of the things that I was very keen to ensure was that we could use that cable for real-time feedback. So, for example, today when we went to unnamed reef, we did a full circumference around the reef and we observed that the tidal height and the waves were benign enough that we could get our boat across the top of the reef. So, rather than having to recover the machine and reprogram it and tell it to do a different task, we just diverted the boat and went across the reef and did these new transects. So it's being able to adaptively manage the kind of data that you collect on the basis of what you're seeing.

SPEAKER_04 18:55

Yeah, so it goes everywhere. You can fly it anywhere. Um what would be the maximum depth that you can take it to? Is it just determined by the length of the cable?

SPEAKER_00 19:02

Yeah, we it took us a while actually to work out work that out. You would think that if you pair enough cable then it would go deep enough, but yeah, there's a few variables and the the main two are the force that's generated by the wings and the drag that's generated by the cable. So as much as you can minimize the cable drag and as much as you can increase the force that the wings generate, that's the depth that you get to. We actually did a maximum depth test that was down to 16 meters, and that was on a 40-meter cable, so it it goes down a reasonable angle, but yeah, as you pay out more and more cable, it tends to just sit on the surface and then go down right at the end, which is quite disappointing after you've paid out a hundred meters of cable. But yeah, we because we have designed the entire thing, it's very configurable and we can increase the force generated by the wings and change the cable setup as well to try and increase the depth if that's required. But as far as I understand that a lot of the interest is in that zero to fifteen meter range, but there might be more interest in the future to go deeper, which is a possibility.

SPEAKER_04 20:16

Could you make it bigger and take people for rides inside of it? Sounds like a no.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

Well, the answer is yes, but uh but this is what you would get. An airbus and a stunt plane are both airplanes and one's bigger than the other, but you would never fly an airbus in the same manner that you'd fly a stunt plane. So you're a diver and you understand that in coral reef areas we can have crazy, crazy terrain. Uh a single coral feature can be one story tall, two stories tall. Some of these coral bombings are even three stories tall, and if you were flying an aircraft around those, you would want it to be a stunt plane, not an Airbus.

SPEAKER_04 21:02

Yeah, so speaking of that, have you ever crashed it?

SPEAKER_02 21:07

I've never crashed it because I don't fly it. I let the young fellas do.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Yeah, we we have had a a few minor crashes and one one fairly significant crash. I guess the challenge is what's visible and the only real big crash that we had was a bit of coral reef which was actually an overhung. So we we kind of flew basically into a cave before he realized oh we're there's no way out here. But yeah, I don't know that we've actually ever lost more than a a wing or a tail that we're able to jump back in and grab and continue on the mission with a with a bit of spare parts. So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 21:43

Good to know it's fairly crash resistant then, since he made it out of a bait board. But when you first had this idea, didn't you tell me that people said it'll never fly? Yeah. Quite literally. Yeah, so how did you believe enough to keep trying until it came true when everyone said you can't make an airplane that flies underwater?

SPEAKER_02 22:09

Uh look, the easiest thing to do is to be a prophet who says nothing ever works because you're pretty much gonna be right ninety percent of the time. It just takes people who persevere. But in this particular case, I literally carved the first prototype out of a bait board and I I found myself the top FPV drone pilot in Brisbane. And I said, Do you think you could fly this? And he looked at and he said, Well, let's give it a go. And we went out on the boat and after about uh five minutes of adjusting controls he said, Yep, this is flying beautifully. And that was the proof that fast underwater flight in a highly maneuverable state was possible. We're not this isn't the first time people have tried to fly things underwater, but it's certainly the first time anyone's attempted high maneuverability sufficient to traverse a coral reef. And there's been plenty of critics along the way, but now that people are seeing it, it's starting to really gain some traction.

SPEAKER_04 23:08

When you think about it, you know, submarines have been around for a very long time. Different types of underwater vessels and even I think remotely controlled submarines already existed. I'm not an expert, but they seem quite bulky and cumbersome, I guess. So this is the only one that flies. How fast does it go and how much faster is that than the nearest other alternative?

SPEAKER_02 23:32

There are plenty of people around who would claim that they've got machines that fly at, you know, three knots and six knots and all the rest of it. And some of them probably do, but we travel routinely at uh five to six knots, so more like eight to ten to even twelve kilometres per hour. We have run this machine up to around about uh nine knots, which uh underwater is exceptionally fast, and it's not too bad when you're out in open water in the deep blue. That's easy because it's quite easy to control. But around the corals and having to manoeuvre, it's exceptionally difficult. To the point where, I mean, w we laughingly say the ideal recruit for us would be a marine biologist of ten years experience who is also a FA18 fighter pilot.

SPEAKER_04 24:28

Ten years marine biology experience and is also a fighter pilot, which must take more than ten years, probably twenty.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

You'd think so, yeah, yeah. And it's it's something we can train people to, but you you have to understand both flight and the sampling strategy that biologists use when they're taking photos. You have to automatically know that if you fly into a different piece of terrain, you might need to move the camera closer to the seabed, for example, to pick up a high-resolution uh image of a subject which has got very, very fine details, or that past a certain angle, for some applications you would want the machine to then roll onto its side and image back against the vertical wall. So it is a combination of being a pilot and a biologist. But a lot of fun. We've done some really nice training exercises with enthusiastic biologists teaching them how to fly, and uh it's not an easy machine to fly. If I'm sure if we gave one to any group of scientists, they would probably crash it in 30 seconds. But it's trainable and it give us a few years, I think we'll have machines which are actually in much, much wider

Remarkable Marine Life Discoveries

SPEAKER_02 25:37

use.

SPEAKER_04 25:38

What's the coolest marine life that you've seen while flying this drone?

SPEAKER_02 25:43

I'm gonna tell a tiny story about some stuff we did in the northern end of the Red Sea, in which we came across an image which I was sure when I looked at it, someone said, Oh, what is this bread? It looked like the lumbar section of the skeleton of a dolphin.

SPEAKER_04 25:59

So it looked like a long segmented spinoid.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

Yeah, but it had segments coming out of it, which I interpreted to be some kind of a process hanging out of the side of the vertebrae. And uh and I was asked, Oh look, do you think you could tell me the coordinates and depth of that so I can go and collect some? I went back to the imagery and I'm looking at it, and it puzzled me because in successive images bits and pieces of it disappeared. And after thinking about it quite a bit and and replaying those images and looking at each in detail, I'm convinced, and uh and another guy that was there with me at the time, convinced, that it was a bobbit worm, which are large aggressive predatory worms. In this case, it's shot out of the hole by about the best part of a meter in under a second, and then retracted.

SPEAKER_04 26:51

Yeah, so if you want to make sure that you get no sleep tonight, go and look up some YouTube videos of the bobbit worm. It's named after one person called uh Mrs. Bobbit, who is infamous for mutilating her husband in a way that you also don't want to read about before bedtime. So the Bobbit worm has uh ferocious jaws, I think. Which sounds like something out of dune, you know, it lives in a hole in the sand, and the hole is pretty much covered up by sand most of the time. So an unsuspecting fish swims over, and the bobbit worm just comes flying out up to uh quite a length, right? That you saw, quite far out, and can just grab that fish that it has sensed the vibrations or the heartbeat of the fish, and then just snaps it back under the sand, the sand covers back over, and if you blink your eye, you would never even know that anything was there. So it sounds kind of like those worms in Dune that can sense people's footsteps on the sand. I swear, all those science fiction and alien movies they get inspired by stuff under the ocean. All those Avatar James Cameron movies were the same. He got all his ideas from under the ocean because we know so little about the sea floor and there's so many weird things. And so you showed a worm expert and they thought it might you might have actually found a new type of bobbit worm, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

No, that's that's true. Uh we spent some time looking up the taxonomy records for bobbit worms, and there's certainly nothing like it.

SPEAKER_04 28:19

And it was quite big. You said the diameter of its body was like girthy, so much bigger than a a dolphin skeleton, actually, once you got close up, right?

SPEAKER_02 28:28

Yeah. Well the the worm body itself was uh probably the thickness of a serious human arm and little kind of uh protuberances hanging out each side and of course a big head and fangs on it.

SPEAKER_04 28:42

Wow. Is anyone writing up a paper about that? Maybe going back to have a closer look?

SPEAKER_02 28:47

I don't know. I know there's some people who look at marine worms over there and we've actually passed on the information, but uh it's not something we've had time to contemplate a paper on. But who knows? But the cool thing is that because of the way our machine collects vast coastal lengths, we collected 350 kilometers of coastline in that project. And because we know the type of habitat this was found in, we could very, very easily give scientists a head start by saying, and you should look in the following places.

SPEAKER_04 29:19

Any other cool things? Like you said, you've seen manta rays. Any any other highlights that anyone's seen out there?

SPEAKER_01 29:25

I think there's some, you know, really common ones that everyone on the boat gets excited about, like dolphins and turtles, it's always great to see them. Today was probably one of my top two highlights, and a nice big shark came and swum in front of us for a little while. But I think one of the other ones that I I really liked, especially after the fact, I mean we see it when we're flying, you don't have time to really pay attention and thinking about it, but there was a uh whiptail ray that we saw, pink whiptail ray, uh, in the Gulf of Akaba, which is only the second sighting in that region. So really cool just to see very rare things, and you know, for a minute we thought we might have been the first to see it up there. Uh we found found one other sighting. So yeah, just really cool to see stuff that few people get to see, and you know, it feels really special to be part of that.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Yeah, maybe I'm showing my my perspective, but I have memories of uh getting in and flying next to the glider and kind of messing with it while it's flying as well, like trying to push it off course and stuff, and yeah, seeing how stable it is in the water and how well it flies is pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_03 30:24

I love that.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Yeah. And then flying through schools of fish is also pretty cool. I'm not too keen on getting in the water, so it's it is pretty cool to see so much reef uh without actually having to get wet. And I was saying today as well, I I went scuba diving once, and the way that I just see the number going from you know eight meters all the way to three meters in about four seconds, and actually understanding how much depth that is and how much it would take a toll on your body if you were doing that in real life. It's pretty incredible the way that it moves through the water. The engineer's view.

SPEAKER_04 30:59

I love that. It's like the best thing I saw on the Great Barrier Reef was this amazing glider that I helped to build. I love

How will this Glider Benefit Marine Conservation?

SPEAKER_04 31:05

that. So, you know, is there dreams to mass produce these so scientists all over the world can enjoy the benefits?

SPEAKER_02 31:14

Yeah, look, I think I'm still hugely motivated by this thing that says one of the reasons the oceans are in trouble is because we don't properly understand them. If you looked at the last decade, one of the things you would conclude is that A, the oceans are getting in a perilous position. The uh climate change, water temperature, etc., is really posing a huge threat. But the nature of the threat has not been very well predicted. For example, we are finding some corals much, much better able to cope with uh higher temperatures uh than we thought, so it's a mixed story. But the point is that our knowledge is patchy, and you know, one of my huge motivations is not so much uh, you know, we don't have data. We do actually have data. We've had data for the last 50 years about the marine environment. We just haven't had enough of it in enough places of the right quality, and sometimes the quality is the fact that you can observe fish and corals at the same time, not as we do now, where you go through and you do a coral survey, and then maybe five years later you do a fish survey in the same place. That doesn't tell you anything about the ecosystem. So for me, this machine is just a means of capturing the right type of data. And so one day, yes, I expect there'll be fleets of them. We even have the ability to put more than one behind the one boat and have them fan out and scan a bigger area. But the real thing that we're focusing on, and it it's this huge inflection point in the way the world works at this point in time, is AI. We collected 3.7 million images in the Red Sea and Gulf of Akaba.

SPEAKER_04 33:00

A lot.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

And uh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:02

Which uh poor PhD student is gonna get stuck analysing all of those?

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Exactly right. So we had uh we developed 28 different models over a period of eight weeks, after which, when we pressed the go button, it took us 20 minutes to analyse all the habitats across 350 kilometers. It took us, was it seven or eight hours or seventeen hours to do the fish and a couple of days to do the coral?

SPEAKER_04 33:28

Yeah, yeah. So you've not only developed this hardware but you've also got software and AI in the background. Did you guys also invent that or is that using existing?

SPEAKER_02 33:39

Uh it's using tools, but developing our own models and also developing our own ways of uh tackling the training problem for when you have 350 kilometers worth of many people do an AI that works for the local bay or 10 or 20, 30 kilometers of reef or something like that. But we have to have AI that works both in Hawaii and Australia and the Red Sea and works over hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of coast. So there's a challenge about that. And we do that, I I'm gonna say I think we do it very, very well, but that's just part of the story is we need to build out this pipeline of data that describes reef condition around the world and makes it available to people in some kind of an online platform, and that's kind of the direction we're going.

SPEAKER_04 34:29

You know, they say that we've got more detailed maps of the sky than of the seafloor, and the ocean often people neglect it because not everyone is a scuba diver, so they don't get to see what's actually down there or what's happening down there. So by bringing all those images up to the surface, it's really exciting. Who are you offering all those images to that you've collected? Are there all kinds of scientists out there that want to see those images of the seafloor?

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess some of our work has been private work, but uh even that sort of stuff goes to benefit the whole because the models that we developed there strengthen the global models that we have. And then other stuff is for organizations where that data might be shared with you know universities and that sort of thing. But we've also done some stuff for community organizations, like when we went and did a big baseline survey for uh Maui Nui Marine Resource Council after the La Haina fires. And so, you know, I I guess yes, we're a private business, but also there is a need there sometimes just to go and collect the data and work with these little community organizations and and just achieve a good outcome. In that case, we managed to get all of their reef surveyed 110-112 kilometres in a couple of days before the rains came and then the opportunity to analyse that over time as and when is needed, go back and do repeat surveys, and we've been back a few times now, so you know, for for us it's about building relationships, and certainly, you know, on the on the last trip to the Red Sea Gulf of Akabar, we had a couple of guest scientists along with us on that trip, and um they were a little bit mind-blown at the volume of data, but also by the depth of the data and what might be able to be pulled out of it. And I think Gautham was saying, you know, uh there really is like 40 or 50 different masters programs that could be pulled out of this just to learn what a whole bunch more about what we're looking at.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

Can I also add though that one of the questions we're commonly asked is about open access to the data? And it was the second question we were asked after the Lahena Wildfire talk, and I pulled up a slide that had been in my presentation, it was a particular image that showed I think it was 36 yellow tang. Now, yellow tang go for around about 500 US dollars on the black market. And if we had made all that data openly available, someone wouldn't have even had to put on a dive gear, they could have just run a net around that one particular GPS location. They knew the location and the depth, and they could have picked up $18,000 worth of illegal fish. So there's also communities around the world uh where they revere particular animals in their marine environment and they're happy enough for you to go and count them, but so long as you don't tell anybody else about them. There are fishing resources which should probably never be known. You know, why why make some of this stuff easier for people to do the wrong thing? And this is a journey that we're still on. Uh you're looking at the other three of us at the moment make all these decisions now, and we are looking to partner with bigger organizations to help us on this journey of how you build a platform that offers this multi-layered uh access control so that all the right people can see the things they need to see, and all the wrong people don't get to see the things they want to see.

SPEAKER_04 37:58

Yeah, that makes complete sense. I think you must have talked to a few fishermen and then the first thing they ask you would be, okay, so if you found any good fishing spots and you mentioned flying it through huge schools of fish, you must be able to find where the secret spots are, and it's good that they should stay secret. And yeah, I liked how you were talking about people's traditional beliefs. You know, fish need privacy too to just live in their home. So uh I think it's it's good that you're thinking about that. So maybe you need to actually apply and have a marine biology thesis that you're working on to get to the higher levels of data or something, right? Yeah. Is there any more stories that you wanted to get across that I didn't already ask about?

SPEAKER_02 38:39

No, no, I would just kind of round it out by saying that this has been something of a passion about waking up in a world where you didn't have to guess at what the data meant. Uh waking up in a world where you've got an abundance of data at your fingertips and you can understand the processes happening in the marine environment and do a better job of protecting it. And it's a total departure from what you can achieve on one tank of air or looking out of one mask and making your observations. Here's a generalization: people who haven't yet seen the gear they tend to think, oh, that can't be right, it just doesn't sound right. But once they're in the boat or once they're looking at that iPad and they go, oh wow, this is a real thing now. And so we're building we we want to you know find others that that believe in this future of better data equals better knowledge, and better knowledge equals better predictions, and better predictions equals a better outcome for the marine environment.

SPEAKER_01 39:39

I guess for me, one of the questions that's been asked in the last few days is what would you like the future to be like, you know, one year from now, ten years or a thousand years? So you know we've been encouraged over the last few days to to think really long term and really big. And yeah, for me, what I'd like the future to be is predictive rather than reactive. At the moment everything seems to be something goes wrong, we notice these signs from the surface, uh, you know, we see the temperature change, those sorts of things, and then we start to look at what's underneath. But I keep thinking back, what happens if we'd started, uh and it's not possible the technology wasn't there, but 50 years ago, if we'd started with broad, deep knowledge search, what would we be able to understand about our reefs now? And so moving forward, what does 50 years from now look like? Man, wouldn't it be great if we could see most of the reefs in the GBR on a regular basis and see the fish and the coral and all of these things all at once and have really great baselines that we can start to pick and predict what's changing, what's shifting, how do we work with that, how do we support it, how do we, you know, fight against some of that change and where and what's appropriate. Yeah.

Remembering Oceans Past, and Predicting their Future

SPEAKER_04 40:45

One of my favourite things about this is since you made it out of a bait board, if you need to cut up some fruit or some watermelon, like in between flights, you can also use it for that, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:55

Um the fact that those wings are so sharp, you could probably take the wing off and use it as a knife.

SPEAKER_04 41:01

Perfect. Well, if you ever run out of gas next to a desert island, you guys will be able to survive just using this. So other uses for this device. I just thought of another question because I think you've probably been a marine biologist for a while, so oh you've got some mozys on you. We better get out of here soon.

SPEAKER_02 41:18

I've been a marine biologist long enough that the mozzies don't my blood's too salty.

SPEAKER_04 41:22

Okay. What what have you seen change with the marine world and the Great Barrier Reef over that time because of environmental impacts? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 41:34

Well, let me tell you two stories, which b one of them came from 1984 and one from 1985.

SPEAKER_04 41:42

That's just before I was born, actually.

SPEAKER_02 41:45

Yeah, yeah. And how cool is it that there are still people around who actually saw stuff back then that can tell you some stories, you know. But here's the go. This first time I went out to uh leading a cruise on the barrier reef, the old guy who was the skipper of the boat, who was probably fifty-five, he said that he had started fishing out on the Great Barry Reef when he was thirteen. So let's call that 40 years before then. So back in the early 40s. And he saw us fishing one night on the back deck and said, Oh, how'd you go? And we said, Oh, great, we caught half a dozen trout and a couple of red throats. And he said, You guys are fools, you wouldn't know what you're talking about. He said, When I was a young fisherman out here, our lines never hit the bottom. We would we had two lines going at one time, we would produce a mountain of fish uh on the deck around us in the evening after having dinner, and if our lines ever hit the seabed, we knew that the place was fished out. And he said, You have no idea of what the reef was like when I was a young young person. And so we talk about this idea of shifting baselines. The second story was when I was doing my honours thesis, and I went out with a cousin of mine on a trawler, and we were collecting scallops for my my thesis, and I sort of suggested to him that we move a little bit further over to the east, and he said, Oh, can't go there yet. We haven't broken the seabed. And I went, What are you talking about, break the seabed? And he said, Oh, well, when we want to trawl a new area, we have to take two boats and a big length of chain, and we traw it through the seabed several times, knock over all those corals and sponges and stuff like that. We let them rot for a year or so. Then we go back in, and for the first year we're trawling the area, we get a lot of that crap in the nets and we have to throw it overboard. After that, it's really easy to trawl the place and because there's nothing left. Because there's nothing left, and um and these are stories which most people have never ever heard.

SPEAKER_04 43:53

Where was that again?

SPEAKER_02 43:54

That's soft townswell.

SPEAKER_04 43:55

Oh, it'll never be the same either again after that.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

Well, you'd like to think that with enough time to recover it will recover. And it and it likely will.

SPEAKER_04 44:05

Because this would have been before the green zones got expanded and everything.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

So yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:09

In 2004, the green zones got expanded. Was it 1974-ish the marine park got declared? I'll have to check my dates, but yeah, anyway. Since then they wouldn't have been trawling off of Townsville, right? Not seabed trolling.

SPEAKER_02 44:22

Uh no, there's quite a bit of seabed trawling that goes on even today. Okay. But uh for prawns, though. Uh prawns, yes. No longer scallops, but prawns. But it's the same nets, it's the same particular chains on the bottom.

SPEAKER_04 44:34

Yeah, I saw it in ocean by David. If anyone hasn't seen it, check it out because you can learn a lot about how bottom trawling is still working in that way today. But I think in order to get that footage was quite difficult for them in the doco, so it still doesn't probably show you what it would really be like if you were to go to like a pristine reef and then just yeah, we've got to get rid of all the corals and then load them all out to make the bottom flat. Oh, that must have felt sad when you found that out.

SPEAKER_02 45:05

Absolutely, absolutely. And it but it's one of the things that we are missing in the world today. There's an entire generation of marine scientists who saw this stuff at the start of their careers and they're moving out of their careers now, going into retirement and things like that. And there's a resource there as a resource of knowledge that needs to be tapped into.

SPEAKER_04 45:27

Mm-hmm. That's why I was so happy that I'm able to talk to you and everyone can listen to you, Brett, because all of the marine biologists that are coming through their studies now would have never seen the reef as you saw it. And it's an incredible place. Like we had amazing, amazing dives today and yesterday. We saw so many cool things. Rays and sharks and turtles, you know, all of it. But like you said, it's a shifting baseline. It's like if you think it's incredible today, it is blown your mind before. Imagine how it would have been before. So yeah. Do you guys have anything to add about the environmental impacts that you've seen?

SPEAKER_01 46:05

No, just that you know, I I have five kids and you know, this the story of time to do that. But the story of, you know, the the change from when dad was in uni to now and the things that we couldn't see, you know, we wanted to go for a shark dive, and the operator said, Well, we can, but I don't guarantee we're gonna see one. You know, that's sad. And I you know, when was that? That was a couple of years ago, I've got two yeah, five years ago, something like that. But yeah, it was sort of like what's it gonna be like when I want to take my kids out and explore some of this stuff with them?

SPEAKER_02 46:35

I mean his oldest one's only uh a year or two away from having his own kids, so the change through generations, yeah. Change through generations are incredible.

SPEAKER_04 46:43

You want to say something else?

SPEAKER_02 46:45

No, no, I just wanted to say that I was very impressed that Adam from Ecologic here in casting a set of questions for the workshop the other day, said, you know, what do you want the reef to look like in a hundred years or a thousand years? And the reality is I'd love to think that in a thousand years it actually looked somewhat like when I the f in fact I'd like to think it went back to looking like it was before the skipper of the boat, you know, got in there and and started catching all the fish. Because I think that would be an absolutely incredible thing to witness. Now I don't think it will go back to that, and I think our big challenge, the challenge of not my generation, because we're kind of uh all about to retire and watch you guys, but the challenge for you guys generation is I don't think you'll be able to restore it, but how do you then craft the future of the reef through your decisions and actions?

SPEAKER_04 47:41

That's a very powerful thought for us to finish off the interview on. Hopefully, everyone can have a deep think about what kind of future we want for our oceans, how you want to see it in ten years, a hundred years, and a thousand years, and then get in your garage and start building some miraculous device that can help save the oceans, or start a YouTube channel, or whatever your skill is to help raise awareness about the ocean.

SPEAKER_02 48:07

Everybody's got a skill. Everybody's got a superpower, and um they just gotta find it.