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Seal-mounted camera recovered after 3 years on ocean floor yields hours of video
- mam2 5y agoHours, or years ^^ ?
- dazhbog 5y agoWhy that camera has lines like this? Was it 3D printed? If it was molded it doesn't make sense to have those lines + paint. Interesting nevertheless that it survived all this time.
- userbinator 5y agoLooks like machining marks to me. I doubt something like that would be 3D printed. I guess you could say that it was a very well-sealed camera.
- torgian 5y agoDadun-tsssss
- prawn 5y agoWhy wouldn't it be 3D printed? Not strong enough? I assume it's a fairly specialised item and shape.
- quartesixte 5y agoEven if it was initially 3D printed, there is a fair bit of CNC machining that goes into making it a final useable product
- dazhbog 5y agoOh yea CNC'd is more likely. A 3D print would never survive.
- dotancohen 5y ago> I guess you could say that it was a very well-sealed camera. Well, it did fall off the seal. Though that's not very typical.
- jstanley 5y agoIt definitely looks 3d printed, although the layer resolution is quite fine and the print quality is very good, and it hasn't been obviously damaged after 3 years in the sea, so I expect this is not printed in PLA on a home 3d printer. Searching for "lidgard underwater camera", I found this blog post, which has more pictures but no explanation of how it was made: https://lidgardphotography.com/tag/sable-island/ https://lidgardphotography.com/tag/sable-island/ - I still think it looks clearly 3d printed. The domain name on the side is https://www.cats.is/ https://www.cats.is/ They have other cameras that are also clearly 3d printed, e.g. https://www.cats.is/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Croc-CATS-Cam.jpg https://www.cats.is/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Croc-CATS-Cam... but they still don't mention how they're made, the page about their cameras is at https://www.cats.is/products/cats-cam/ https://www.cats.is/products/cats-cam/
- purplecats 5y agoif only they shared the videos in these type of articles
- stewbrew 5y agoDo you really want to watch a seal swimming for several hours? The video on top of the page contains some snippets.
- deepsun 5y agoYes. There are many HN users who would happily go over hours of boring seal video. Several times.
- specialist 5y agoTo wit, my SO watches web cam of grizzlies catching salmon. A lot of waiting. I guess it's meditative?
- therein 5y agoYes please. That's in fact what I came here for.
- eeegnu 5y agoI found this article[1] answered allot of the questions I was left with after reading the linked article. > “What we normally do is put a satellite transmitter on any animal that we deploy instruments on. In this case, we didn’t, because we expected this (camera) just to be gone at sea for a couple of days,” said Lidgard in an interview Friday. > “With hindsight, probably not a good idea,” he added with a laugh. > The idea, he said, was to deploy the camera four or five times, each time removing it from the seal to get the data after a few days and reattaching it to continue the research. > In this case, Lidgard said he thinks the seal was starting to go through the moulting process and was foraging for food when the camera fell from its back. No video footage there either sadly. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/10/08/lost-seal-mounted-camera-found-3-12-years-after-deployment-in-ns-biologist.html https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/10/08/lost-seal-mou...
- SomeBoolshit 5y ago>allot My god. This will probably considered a low value comment on here but the phrase is "a lot".
- grp000 5y agoCrazy. Even on HN there are allot of spelling mistakes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- neither_color 5y agoI wonder if the other seals notice something is off about the seal with the large conspicuous device on its back.
- zionic 5y agoProbably not. The humans are 250% more intelligent and don’t notice our implants.
- torgian 5y agoWait a second... I sense an undercover seal.
- ycombinete 5y agoAstrokelping
- walrus01 5y agoScientists missed an opportunity for a humorous "warranty void if seal broken" notice engraved into the camera body
- adolph 5y agoThat and who knew seals could stay underwater so long? And how is it the camera only returned hours of video after filming for three years?
- userbinator 5y agoYou'd need a huge battery to power a camera for that long, as well as enough storage to match. Let's assume something at the low end of the quality scale, e.g. 1Mbps 480p H.264; that's 125KB/s, or roughly 11TB for 3 years of video. Likewise, take 5W as an average power consumption. 5W for 3 years turns out to be around 130kWh, which is a large capacity even for an EV battery. For comparison, the largest Tesla has 100kWh.
- darkerside 5y agoHave you seen the movie Contact? Like that but in reverse
- Arch-TK 5y agoThey don't, they think the camera fell off the seal.
- andrewflnr 5y agoMy read of this article is that the camera was only turning on for short periods, basically sparse samples of time.
- therein 5y ago"Warranty void if seal is missing" might be better.
- rzzzt 5y ago"Remove protective seal before installing the memory card"
- thamer 5y agoHow do they attach the camera? I see that it has metal band clamps, but what do they grab onto? A seal's back is all smooth.
- 0xBA5ED 5y agoLooks attached to that mesh and the mesh was attached by some kind of adhesive. You can see the fur it took with it.
- prawn 5y agoThis appears to be the company making this and other animal-mounted cameras: https://www.cats.is/products/cats-cam/ https://www.cats.is/products/cats-cam/ If you browse around the site, you can find photos of them attaching cameras to whales, etc.
- kortex 5y agoThese seals sleep on the ocean floor? Seems like tempting fate a little bit! Must be some strong evolutionary pressure not to just sleep on land.
- TechBro8615 5y agoUnexpected to me. As a seal, I like my chances escaping from a wolf on a rock better than from a shark on the ocean floor. I can escape land predators by jumping into the water, but I can’t escape aquatic predators unless I happen to be able to outswim them to some nearby land mass.
- dotancohen 5y agoYou type very well for your species. What type of input device do you use?
- stewbrew 5y agoThis way they can probably cover greater diatances. Could also be it's more relaxing to take a nap at the bottom of the sea with the family far away.
- MauranKilom 5y ago...but how? They have to breathe? How long can they sustain on one lung volume of air if they can sleep underwater?
- b112 5y agoYou need much less air when sleeping, compared to being awake, and much less sitting still, than moving. Two reductions there. If they can last even 10 minutes under, while moving, I'd think they can last hours while sleeping.
- thinkloop 5y ago3 years of suffering for 19 hrs of video
- 6510 5y agoNot even that, all we got was an article about a video.
- cheschire 5y agoA thousand words is worth a picture. Hours of video at 25fps means they owe us another 270,000 or so words.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThere is no implication that the seal suffered.
- MarcoZavala 5y ago