Marty Odlin, who grew up and lives on the Maine coast, remembers
what the ocean used to be like. But now, he said, “It’s like a desert and just
within my lifetime.” In the last few years, he said, he has seen lots of sea
grass and many other species virtually disappear from the shoreline.
اضافة اعلان
Odlin, 39, comes from a fishing family and has a passion for the
history of the ocean and the coast, both of which have informed his sense of
the ocean’s decline, a small part of the catastrophic deletion of marine life
over the last several hundred years.
Using his training as an engineer, Odlin has decided to try to
reverse that decline with his company, Running Tide, which is based in
Portland. Using a combination of robotics, sensors and machine learning, he is
building an aquaculture operation that is selling oysters now and eventually
clams. He is also using that system to grow kelp, with the goal of producing
enough of this seaweed to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and
permanently sequester it by burying it on the ocean floor, and sell carbon
offsets.
The company also plans to seed oyster reefs and clam beds along
the shoreline, and restore kelp forests and sea grass, to help the coastal
ecosystem by bringing back biodiversity and improving water quality, among
other benefits.
Odlin’s plans are one of a number of efforts in the “blue
economy,” a term used to describe commercial activity on the oceans, seas and
coasts. He and others are trying to prove that ocean conservation, sustainable
fishing and carbon sequestration can be good for business, especially as global
shipping, aquaculture and the appetite for wild seafood increases around the
world.
Odlin and his team build everything: boats, oyster floats,
sensors and more, all with very high sensitivity to their environment. They
measure the amount of feed in the water and the growth rate of the various
species and send that information into a database that they use to make all
sorts of decisions: whether to change the feed, reposition the shellfish floats
or make bigger changes about the varieties they’re growing. They also use the
hard-won knowledge of commercial fishermen — there are about a dozen on staff —
which Odlin said was a huge advantage.
The climate crisis demands technological innovations and “hard
hats and steel toes,” he said.
Dan Watson, the chief executive and co-founder of SafetyNet
Technologies, also has recognized the benefits of working alongside industry
and demonstrating profitability.
His company builds high-tech fishing nets for trawling boats:
Attached to the nets are LED lights that flash in various patterns and levels
of brightness to signal emergency escape hatches (right-size holes) for those
species that fishing boats aren’t trying to catch, known collectively as
bycatch.
Studies have shown that LED lights can significantly reduce the
amount of unwanted species that end up in fishing nets.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, about 9.1 million tons, or just over 10 percent of all of the fish
caught every year, are thrown away, with nearly half coming from trawling nets.
In an era of overfishing and shifting habitats because of
climate change that defy international regulations, reducing the amount of fish
or other marine animals that are caught by mistake could have important
consequences for the health of various populations as well as ocean
biodiversity as a whole, Watson said.
“When I started all of this, I was a student, and I had the attitude
of, ‘This is going to save the world and everyone should do it,’” Watson said.
“I had to turn more towards, ‘Here is the value proposition, and
there is a strong financial argument for catching the right fish,’” he added. “We
can show crews, ‘Here is what you save on fuel, here is what you save on
regulatory fines.’”
Others, too, see the value of working with industry groups.
Whale Safe is an initiative from the University of California Santa Barbara to
help big ships avoid hitting whales as they travel through ports around Los
Angeles. The program came, in part, as a response to shipping companies asking
for help, according to Douglas McCauley, a professor of ocean science at University
of South Carolina Beaufort (UCSB).
Ship strikes, as they are known, are among the leading causes of
death for whales, and 2018 and 2019 were the worst years on record for
collisions on the West Coast, with 27 total resulting in 22 deaths, according
to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Scientists estimate
that the actual number of whales killed by ships could be much higher — as many
as 80 a year off the West Coast, according to one study — because not all of
the bodies are discovered.
McCauley helped bring together ocean technologists working at
UCSB to build a near real-time detection system for whales in the Santa Barbara
Channel, combining three inputs: an artificial intelligence algorithm that
analyzes whale sounds, classifies them by species, and sends the data for
review; a remote sensing system that predictively forecasts whale presence; and
plain old citizen science, where trained whale watchers log whales into a
mobile app.
“It’s not helpful if you’re only able to say, ‘Southern
California is forecast to be cloudy with a chance of blue whales,” and this
model forecasts at a much finer scale, McCauley said.
The system delivers the information to ships in a simplified
rubric of low, medium, high and very high, so that they can slow if whales are
around, which can significantly reduce the number of ship strikes. Whale Safe
provides data about only this particular stretch of the California coast, but
McCauley said they were planning to expand to San Francisco and possibly
elsewhere in North America.
When ships reduce their speed they use less fuel, resulting in
fewer greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants; the global shipping
industry accounts for nearly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Any of these projects require a more hands-on approach to saving
the ocean and a more deliberate overlap of business and conservation, which
have historically been at odds, said Odlin, the founder of Running Tide.
“We have to take a more active role in solving the problem that
we’re seeing,” he said. “And how do you take a more active role? The moral
imperative is that you have to build something at the scale of the problem.”
Otherwise, he said, “generations in front of us are not going to
forgive us.”
“We still have a chance right now, so I’m working as hard as I
can.”
