Reunion Day 2 — 11th March Community Project Day
MIT Bootcamp Alumni Reunion — Boston 2020
Moment-by-Moment Photo/Video Chronicle & Updates from the Event
On day 2 of the reunion, the group travels to Provincetown, MA to learn about whale entanglement, Sunfish strandings, and work to find ways to help as they clean up the beach and try some very New England eats.
Meetup & Departure
In Provincetown
Coastal Cleanup Operation
How does one deal with an abandoned vessel?
Lunch Break
Afternoon: Marine Conservation Expert Presentation by Carol Carson of NECWA and Scott Landry of CCS
Bootcamper Hackathon — Problem
“This stranding season, the fall/early winter of 2019, NECWA documented over 114 live and dead stranded ocean sunfish along the shores of Cape Cod and surrounding areas. This was the busiest stranding season ever! There were probably another 40 or 50 carcasses that we did not get to, so the number of stranded ocean sunfish is even higher.” — Carol “Krill” Carson, Marine Biologist and President, NECWA.
The number of strandings both organizations respond to are but a small percentage of worldwide standings, but the issues that roadblock both organizations echo a story that is found throughout the world. This issue has vast global implications on the health of our oceans, and global health. The current solutions available to biologists present them with challenges in that they are either incomplete or cost-prohibitive.
More information on this page
Team Writeups
(bus brainstorm hack session)
Team 1
A system to track lobster feeding and movement patterns to more logically place lobster fishing pods, along with an app that helps keep track of this with gps virtual buoys on lobster pods that can be deployed with a small attached air compressor with inflatable balloons to bring it to the surface one it reaches a certain weight. If a rope structure must be used on the sea floor, it would have longer solid pieces with elbows with elbow joints at strategic junctures that are detachable with a certain amount of applied force.
Team 2
Need an understanding that the solutions are low-cost and low-tech due to fishing companies are family run conventionally.
Sun Fish: Very difficult to physically move Sunfish back into water, need to figure out the physics to reduce the difficulty of this process. Could we just keep it alive long enough for the tide to come in, to avoid having to carry it all the way back into the water?
Entagement Occuring Issue:
Information: 3,000,000 lobster traps in Cape Cod and they entangle whales very easily, up to 150 per year. These whales then die over a 6 month period.
1) Smooth roping to not wear away at the whales skin
2) Area limited lobster fishing, warning if whale enters that area or stop the whale from going into those areas. Encourage the lobsters to grow in that area. Requires government Intervention.
3) Lobster Cages with magnets, does not require “release” functionality which is increasing the price on “acoustic Bouys”. Rope with Magnet is lowered, directed onto Lobster trap, then proper hook attachment is lowered along rope to pick up trap from.
4) Large foam noodles around gear rope too large for the whales to get caught on (1 meter diameter foam around rope, whale won’t get caught?).
Detanglement Dangers and Difficulty:
1) Drone to cut rope
2) Substance to eat away at rope, pour on whale?
Whale Entagement Notification:
1) Track whales — super important for many different ideas
2) Scanner on fishing gear to detect forces on them.
3) GPS sensor on rope which alerts location Tracking
Battery Problems
Update Lobster Fishing:
1) Mobile Lobster traps
2) RFID tag on each lobster trap, when scanned before dropping from boat, take the GPS location of the phone/scanner, have a database of the locations of different traps in the area. Combine with tracking of whales to determine which whales need to be checked for entanglement.
3) Connected Lobster Traps to order to reduce how much rope is used. One long snaking lobster trap, instead of having rope connecting various lobster traps.
Main Idea: A key issue is lack of awareness from the general population (if people were more aware, they would want to push for change and be more willing to donate).
Whale Social Media: Tracking the whales and allowing people to be aware of what is happening with them.
Get your weekly update on how “Emma” (a whale) is doing. A method like this to increase awareness and use people’s empathy. Combine with helmet footage to get weekly videos of rescue attempts from the team on youtube. Would need an initial investment of time and energy to get a network up where people can upload the whales’ stories. If you already know the family history of a whale you can personify the whales a lot more and get people being far more invested in assisting your issue.
Best would be a live tracking of the whales through the ocean (at least to the latest time they went up for air). Allow a person to get invested in a particular whale and it’s story. Highly recommend looking into approaches to get celebrity endorsement, maybe a family of whales can inherit a particular celebrities’ last name, passing it down their whale family line.
Whale Entanglment Wiki: Solving all these issues requires more wide-spread knowledge about the practices, dangers and personnel involved in protecting whales. The information about these whales, to properly engage with these issues. Starting point would be a simple wiki page which is just about the whales that are known and the issues they have gone through.
Further points:
- Whale Wiki: Individual history of each Whales, first and last names for each whale.
- Tag whales somehow to update people on the last “airtime” of the whales.
- Global teams following the different whales (name sports teams after them?)
- Case study information for Business schools to know about the issue and discuss it
- Research on whales and their way of life
- Collect the data (we need this data to examine)
- Courses on whale saving
- Youtube channel of whale saving videos: Could be used to update people about their activites.
- Editing for whale team
- Need a cool name, can’t be “New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance”
- Celebrity Endorsement: A celebrity could have a particular whale as “their whale” to protect, keep people updated about.
What is their current social access, how do they increase awareness?
Team 3
Sonar fencing… Sound pods placed strategically around lobster pods areas that emit a frequency that is unpleasant but harmless to whales and does not negatively affect important populations. Drones that pick up lobster pods.
Team 4
Magic Rope
The problem being solved is of animals being entangled in fishing ropes. There are a number of reasons why rope is still used in the industry:
· Being able to chain multiple traps
· Being able to anchor physical buoys
· Being able to pull up heavy traps from the seafloor
· Having a low upfront cost
To solve this issue, the idea of variable stiffness rope is introduced. Once the rope has been deployed, the rope increases in stiffness so that it effectively becomes a stiff rod. Once this happens, animals cannot get entangled even if they accidentally bite into the rope. Due to its high stiffness, the rope will simply break rather than entangling the animal.
This idea minimally interferes with existing workflows for fishermen. It continues to allow them to chain multiple traps together so they can efficiently retrieve all their traps at the same time. With a similar tensile strength to normal ropes, it will continue to allow fisherman to pull up the traps. Variable stiffness is required so that they can spool up the rope on the fishing boat, rather than having to store a 300m long rod.
More photos, by kind courtesy of Krill
Evening Dinner & Networking Time
Footnote
For reasons that I have since then explained in another article “There, But Not There”, I was in Boston but in stealth mode, i.e., not attending the Reunion events. So, the upside is: it puts me in the shoes of those who could not physically make the trip. I am thus collecting all the visual fragments — like tasty crumbs — that our fellow-Bootcampers are dropping behind them on the trail of their Great Adventure, to reshare with the rest of the community. Enjoy!
