AI Is Here to Save The Whales. And Sharks. And Bees

they've got something else in common too. In each case, entrepreneurs or scientists are testing new ways to use artificial intelligence and other technologies to try to protect these species from harm. Let's go from big too small and start with whales. My co league Todd Woody writes about the environment from Bloomberg Green, and he's here with me from San Francisco to tell us about our project that warrens ship captains when they're on a collision course with giant

underwater mammals. Todd, you've written about this new technology called Whales Safe, which is intended to stop giant container ships from hitting and killing whales. I have to admit I didn't know that this was a big problem. How big a problem is it for endangered whales? Ship strikes are one of the leading causes of death. So it's a huge problem, particularly because, for instance, blue whales, their migratory

patterns and routes cross major global shipping lanes. Scientists aren't quite sure, but whales tend to feed in certain spots. They may not hear the ship or the noise, you might drown out their ability to get out of the way. Definitely, it's a major issue. Where's the worst place in the world for this? Where does this happen the most. It's a global problem. I don't know if there's one particularly

place it's worse than others. A study that came out in recent years tracked or mapped migration patterns for whales across the world, and it really did show that they coincide with the major shipping lanes. So how does Whale safe work? How does it actually protect the whales. It's operating in two locations, one in the Santa Barbara Channel, which is a major blue whale feeding ground and also a major super highway for ships heading toward Los Angeles,

and also off the coast of San Francisco. And what they do is they place a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone out in the ocean, which can detect whale vocalizations.

It's a whale song get whale songs, and so that data is beamed to computer servers somewhere and artificial intelligence program matches it against library of tens of thousands of other whale sounds to identify the type of species, and one that species is identified and located, it beams that information to ship captains so they can take action like slowing down. And so are all the shipping companies now

tied into this network. It's a totally voluntary program, but I think around sixty percent have agreed to use this information off California. And since they implemented this has there actually been a drop in the number of whales that are being struck by these ships. The probably was only a couple of years old, but in Santa Barbara, the first full year it was an operation, they did show a drop in ship strikes. Scientists say it's too early to say if you know that this is the causal effect,

but they say it's good news. Nonetheless. One thing you write in your story, which I found really fascinating, is that because whales are so depleted after many, many years of their populations falling that even just one whale that's killed can have a huge effect on the future survival of the species. Yes, particularly of blue whales, is only like one point to whales per year in certain areas

would affect the sustainability of the species. We only recover the bodies of very tiny portion of whales that are hit by ships. Most are hit in the open ocean and they sink to the bottom of the ocean, so scientists basically have to estimate how many are killed each year. Tad, you also write about how important whales are to limiting the effects of climate change. You gotta say that was

a surprising one to me. How do they do that? Yes, it's still a developing science, but scientists have quantified how much carbon whales absorbed sequester in their bodies, which are huge, and when they die, that carbon the bloodies sink to the bottom of the ocean where it's sequestered. That probably a bigger impact is when they poop. They spawned big phytoplankton blooms and phytoplanks sequesters some thirty seven billion tons

of c O two every year. Top predators like whales and sharks are not in disimportant because they're sort of charismatic creatures we like to see, but they're vital to keeping ocean ecosyst some healthy because they regulate predator prey populations. All the things that we're talking about here kind of point to a sort of urgent need for action when it comes to just protecting biodiversity in oceans to keep things from becoming severely imbalanced, losing species that play important roles.

There have been any number of international efforts, including by the U n to try to protect marine in life. How is that going. We don't actually hear about it all that much with so many other things happening in the world. Since delegates to the United Nations have been negotiating a treaty to protect the biodiversity of the High Seas that would be accomplished mainly by creating marine protected areas and requiring environmental impact assessments that potentially harmful activities

in international waters. The treaty was supposed to be finalized in two but agreement could not be reached. The next and supposedly final negotiating session begins February, and you talked about the high seas and when we think theres kind of romantic pirates and the high seas, but that's actually a term. What are the high seas? The high seas are the areas beyond national jurisdiction, so area of the ocean that's beyond the two mile limit of countries exclusive

economic zone. And what would this agreement, if they're able to reach one, what would actually do. What are the provisions in it. One of the main provisions that would help conserve species would be it would allow the creation of marine protected areas on the high seas, so areas where fishing could be banned, where other harmful activities could

be banned. The other aspect would be requiring these environmental impact assessments, So before say some big fishing operation or some extractive operation could be done, you would have to do an assessment to see what the impact would be on marine species in the area. And do you think it's likely that we're going to see an agreement? Seeing how it keeps getting pushed back. They're very close on

a lot of things. There's some other aspects of the treaty that are more controversial that sort of hung up negotiations. So it was supposed to be done in the pandemic push that back. They met last March that was supposed to be the final negotiating session. They did not reach agreement.

They met again in August, did not reach agreement. So there's really there's a lot of pressure on to wrap this thing up in February and March of this year, given the lack of action by international organizations and governments of the world. It seems like the things we're talking about here are companies and scientists stepping in to fill the need. Are there other examples of companies or scientists kind of employing new technologies, AI and other sorts of

things to help. Yes, there's one very simple technology that's been put out there for experimenting that seems to work as led lights that are attached to fishing lines, and that has been shown to deter sea turtles. So all seven of the world's sea turtle species are endangered. So these are like lights for some reason, it makes the

sea turtles stay away from the nets. Is there a lot of investment in this or companies putting money into developing these technologies or is it just very expensive and it's difficult to profit from it. Right now, it's mainly scientists who are developing these technologies. I would say there's not a you know, not a private investment, but ocean companies do have an interest in lowering the impact on

marine species. I mean, for instance, it's not a good look when a cruise ship steams into port with an endangered whale wrapped around a bow, which happened in southern California a couple of years ago. So there's definitely an interest for them too, you know, for instance, like for the Whale Safe to sign up for those alerts. We'll be right back, Tad. You've written another story about a company in the UK that's trying to come up with

a solution to what's called shark bycatch. That's when sharks are caught on hooks that are intended for other fish. It's this device called shark Guard. What exactly is it? So it's a small slender advice is attached to phishing hooks for like long long line tuna vessels, which will deploy like miles and miles of phishing hooks, and it admits an electric field that shark's consents and it repels them because they want to stay away from that field.

Our producer, Frederica Roman Yellow went to visit phish Tech Marine, the company that invented shark Guard, to see how it's made. I'm endeavor and I'm here with Pitt Keble. He is the co founder of Phish Tech Marine and the managing director of the company. The other co founder of the companies is brother Ben Kibble. One of the things that you are trying to put out in the market is something called shark Guard. And you're holding the fourth prototype.

You're saying, right, yes, that's right. So this is number four, hopefully the final prototype. So after this while we're now currently working on the sort of final commercial version, if you like. So, this device is the shark Guard, generates a electric pulse every couple of seconds, generates an electric

sort of field around the baited hook. The sharks are extremely sensitive to electric currents, thousands of times more sensitive to electric fields than say, teleost fish things like tuna, herring, card, et cetera. So the device just literally clips in. This prototype.

Shark Guard has a small lithium battery and it's designed to last for I think it's about sixty or seventy hours of pulsive sixty seventy hours six to seven days of fishing, which typically could be a fishing trip, if they're going out a day or two, steaming fishing for a week and then steaming back. The holder is fitted on the branch line when they're rigging the gear, and the shark guard can be removed when you need to replace a battery. Let's describe the actual shark guard itself.

It's a fairly small, maybe ten fifteen centimeter cylinder with copper, I think that bronze. These electrodes, and these are sort of positive negatives of creating the electric field in a clear tube. And you can see the drive circuit here, capacity, battery, et cetera. So that's detecting when it's in the water and then activating every couple of seconds. It generates a thirty forty vault pulse and that's what deters the sharks. And how does that work? How does it deter sharks?

Why are sharks the turd? But say tuna or what people want to fish is not the turd. So sharks have a system of electro receptors ampili of Lorenzini, tiny little pits around the snout in the mouth of the shark, and they use this to detect, for example, the tiny electric currents generated by fish, by prey. So whenever muscle twitches or muscle moves, you've got your neurons, your nerve cells and activate the muscle. You get these these tiny

little currents generated. And the sharks developed a very very sensitive system of electro receptors so it can detect the currents that are generated by prey. So sharks have a detection threshold if you like, where they can detect the electric field and it might actually attract them. Above a certain voltage field strength if you like, then it deters them. It's too strong, too powerful. So a bit like you know, our ears, for example, are designed for picking up sound,

you know, communicating, you know, speech, et cetera. They're quite sensitive organs. If someone's yelling in our ear, it's not very comfortable, so we tend to move away. So the sharks got very sensitive organ system if you like, these electro sensors receptors, but if they're over stimulated, gets to the point where it's uncomfortable, so they'll move away from that field. There was a study conducted in corporation with the University of Exeter, which is not too far away

from here. What did the study find? So the shark guards were deployed in a commercial French blue fin tuna fishery in the Mediterranean. The fishery has I think that about forty fifty vessels active in the fishery and they do have an issue with blue shark and pelagic ray cartilaginous fish so in the same family as sharks, if you like. So we're trying it in the fishery at two commercial vessels, five hundred shark guards, five hundred control

hooks if you like, without shark guards. The results were pretty pretty astonishing. So we had over ninety reduction in blue shark bycatch and about a se reduction in pelagic ray bycatch. And do you anticipate a lot of uptake in terms of companies that might be interested in this. There will probably be relatively few fishes that would willingly kitten their vessels out with a shark guard system. I think the big driver here though, is going to be

the massive push for shark conservation. So at the moment, the plagic fleets are supplying tuner and swordfish too supermarkets around the world. Now there's a significant shark by catch issue associated with every kiload of tuner and swordfish that

essentially derived from pledgical longline operations. So my feeling is that if there's longline fleets that are currently interacting with sharks want to carry on supplying your kind of top shelf supermarkets with all the environmental, social, corporate drivers, they're going to have to improve their act in terms of

reducing shark bike catch. And I would hope that over the next few years that starts to manifest and we start to see more uptake of these, you know, shark of shark guard systems in these vessel Todd, we've just heard how tech could potentially save sharks from being killed each year. Was it so important to protect sharks? Since nineteen seventies, scientists estimate that shark populations have fallen, and they estimate around a hundred million sharks are killed each year.

Often they're killed by being entangled or ensnared in fishing lines. It's a huge issue because sharks, again like whales, are top predators in the ocean. Todd Woody, thanks so much for talking with me. Thank you. When we come back from C to air, can technology help save honey bees? So we talked about tech solutions to help save whales and sharks. Now we're gonna talk about bees. I'm joined now by my colleague Coco Lu in New York. Coco, you've written a story about a company called bee Flow

which is helping to restore the populations. Could you tell us what this company does. B Flow is California based to startup, and then it used the biotechnology to help these survive under the current threat and also help the remaining be population to pollinate to the right crops as a way to help farmers increase the crop output. The way to do is it has two types of supplements. So once I learned from the reporting is that hallibees actually don't do very well in code weathers. It's performance

drops significantly when the temperature is called. Just like humans take a supplement to post it's immune system, b Flows created supplements using plant based ingredients to help hallibees also posted their emune system so they can keep working even though the temperature is UH is low. So they essentially feed the bees this kind of like vitamin boosts supplement to get their energy. Yet it's kind of like that, so it's a kind of supplement what the company is

trying to achieve. So one is to give this extra nutrition or the nutrition that bees are miss currently missing because of the loss of habitat, So bees can you know, survive better in under the current environment. And another thing is they have a second supplement which is kind of for like a memory conditioning supplement. The way it works is with smell flower, which is a smell flower, but

that smell actually contains different signals two different animals. So scientists bill flow do is to fund the right signal that talks to hardibees and then the creator supplement with that signal. Whenever the face of this supplement to the bees and the b's are exposure to the smell of the flower they give the hardibe is a sugar syries.

Hardibis are trained to associate at the smell with the food, so whenever the bis go out to the field, they were just actively you know, thick that smell rather than being dured away by wilder flowers. By doing so, it kind of increased the efficiency of hardi peopoulation for agriculture. This is an attempt to try to increase the population, increase I guess be productivity. Given the current threat, can you talk just a little bit about what that threat is,

like why do we need this. Basically, what has happened in the past two decades under were probably unfortunately to continue to happen, is that the global population has declined significantly worldwide, and then that was caused by a combination of factors like the loss of habitats and the use of pesticides, and of course climate change. Hardi bis usually don't do very well in cold weathers, so the extreme code slabs could kidle of our peace. Why is it

so important now to protect these from cold weather? Why is that a problem now when it wasn't a problem before. We have said an increase in extreme weather events, so that makes its most important for us to detection now. China recently got hit by record low temperature in North China, and then we have said that in other parts of California and then other landing Europe as well. So all of those extreme weather events well of fact the survival

of peace. Including hartebees. You have found in reporting that there is actually a correlation between a dropping honey bees and sort of dropping pollination in deaths. So one reason the study found that insufficient decoordination is causing about five hundred thousand earlier's a year around the world. The way to think about is that you know, if we don't have peace to pollinate to the plants and we we eat, then our diet would be forced to change, and then

the loss of nutrition would affect our health. If all the HARDI bias guidet for good this period for good, humans probably wouldn't go extinct. But it's about the change of our diet and the loss of nutrition. We need to keep our healthy and high for on non life and better quality of life. Our bee keepers around the world looking at similar sorts of things to help their own be populations. And how big is the worldwide push

to conserve bees. I think it's a global move. Beflow is just one company offering you know uh service to hardibe's survival. There are also other companies like there is a startup in Europe that provide in high fool smartest sensor for be capers. Basically, the idea is if there is something out of lormal in the bee hive, the company will sending a neard to be capers to interfame before it's too late. So that's another way to help

be survival in this environment. And then I know us startup it's also developing vaccines for bees against the deadly disease. And I think both seeing UK and Russia that are companies doing the so called early warning system because you know, the pesticide distribution is a huge issue for the survival for bees. But as a big caper, how do you

know the farm next to you will spread pesticides. So there are internet companies collecting data from farmers and then send the learned to be capers to say, hey, guys, you probably want to move your heife because they're going to spread pesticide in the next hour. Coca Lu, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. You can read more from Todd Woody and Coco Lu and Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and

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