By Jeremy Friedman We’re almost done! On Thursday we presented to a bunch of parents and faculty members. We really enjoyed showing off our device and showing people how it worked. They seemed really interested and optimistic about the effectiveness of our idea. We also showed our audience the video we took when testing to see how the sea lions react to the sound of a transient orca whale. The overall presentation went really smoothly. Even though I was worried in the beginning I quickly became comfortable and in the end had a great time. I learned that when presenting it is really important to give detailed explanations or the group we are presenting will be confused and walk away with the wrong impression of our project.
Published by Andy Yu: Hello there! We are back to bring you our 3D printed casing for our speakers. The 5 inch cube protects the speakers and the motion sensors from the water and other collisions that might occur. The holes are big enough for the motion sensors to fit through and sense the sea lions swimming around when they are close enough. The square like hole is for the speaker to project the sounds of a killer whale, a sea lion's natural predator, to scare the sea lions away from the area. This way, the sea lions don't get caught in the fishing nets and the fishers can just buy regular nets with our speakers on them to help the California Sea Lions.
This is a picture of us creating our solutions and working on the solution document. Published by Bobby Watkins: Bienvenue blog readers! Welcome! This last week has been amazing! We were very productive every class period and decided on our final problem and our first solution. The past two weeks we brainstormed problems. Our problem started with sea lion migration. We researched out from here and narrowed down the problem. First, we researched threats to their migration, this lead to threats to their habitat. Threats to their habitat connected to threats to breeding, and from breeding, we found the problem of fishing nets. Our final problem was that sea lions were getting caught in fishing nets that had been cut off, because there was a problem with them. This is a problem because the sea lions would swim for long distances with this fishing net attached to them the net slows them down, resulting in fatigue and severe injuries. These can lead to death. We felt that we should do something about this, so we researched solutions, and using this research, we conceptualized our beginning solution. Our strongest solution is to put a device that produces the sound of an orca whale at 1 to 40 kHz on fishing nets. We decided on an orca whale, specifically at 1 to 40 kHz because they are predators of sea lions and sea lions can hear sounds that are measured at 1 to 40 kHz. I know what you might be thinking, and no, fish cannot hear sounds at 1 to 40 kHz, that is why we chose this, in fact, they generally cannot hear sounds measured above 1 kHz. Another solution of ours is to create a net that biodegrade more efficiently than then ones used today. One of the specific types of nets we were thinking about was to make a net out of food, Jeremy suggested “noodle nets”, however making a fishing net out of food, most likely would not be very successful. Plus, making biodegradable nets would probably not be done before our deadline, but it is an idea that we should pursue. Scientists are researching and creating prototypes for more efficiently biodegradable nets and implementing them, we were planning on improving upon these previous ideas. The net made out of food is one way we could improve upon a biodegradable fishing net. The scientists researching this have made lots progress over the last decade, and are still making progress now. As for the sound device, we have not found a company that is currently implementing this device, or one similar to it. I hope next week is just as, or even more effective than last week. This is a picture of us revising our solutions and figuring out how we could improve them.
Published by Audrey Sachs: Welcome readers to our blog! We are a group of seventh graders looking to make the world a better and safer place. At the moment the theme we’re following surrounds animal migration and the tragic struggles animals face when following their annual patterns of movement. One of the groups of animals being largely disrupted from migrating is the Southern California Sea Lion. As these sea lions prepare to commence on their rigorous journeys they eat large amounts of seafood and can mistake plastic and other toxic substances for the common fish. While more and more pollution infects the ocean more and more sea lions die at the hand of humans. We felt deeply compelled to assist the carnivorous mammals because it is only right that the species that took away innocent aquatic lives should give back by saving as many as possible. While we have not developed a thorough solution yet, we know that we want to focus it around battling ghost fishing and other trash producing methods that hurt sea lions. Ghost fishing is a very common method used by humans when fishing and is the process of a piece of netting or fishing line being abandoned by its user after serving its purpose or after getting stuck on underwater plants. It can be extremely harmful if not deadly to sea lions who swallow the discarded fishing gear because the pieces get stuck in their digestive systems and can choke them. Our next post will update you on the progress of our solution. You can find out more by looking around the other parts of the website!
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