How bionic jellyfish with tiny prosthetics could reveal the secrets of the deep sea

Bionic jellyfish soon could help researchers find out more about the ocean.

Engineers from Caltech and Stanford University have made tiny prosthetics that help jellyfish swim faster, a EurekAlert! news release said. The devices also don’t stress the jellyfish, researchers said.

The technology could answer big questions about the ocean, much of which has gone unexplored, last week’s news release said.

“Only a small fraction of the ocean has been explored, so we want to take advantage of the fact that jellyfish are everywhere already to make a leap from ship-based measurements, which are limited in number due to their high cost,” Caltech’s John Dabiri, who was a lead researcher on the project, said in the news release. “If we can find a way to direct these jellyfish and also equip them with sensors to track things like ocean temperature, salinity, oxygen levels, and so on, we could create a truly global ocean network where each of the jellyfish robots costs a few dollars to instrument and feeds themselves energy from prey already in the ocean.”

The prosthetic is about 2 centimeters big and attaches to the body of the jellyfish. Jellyfish use a pulsing motion to move forward, and the new prosthetic uses electrical impulses to speed that pulsing up, the news release said.

With the device, jellyfish could swim about three times faster than normal, and they use only about twice as much energy to do so, the researchers said. Jellyfish were more than 1,000 times more efficient than swimming robots, Stanford graduate student Nicole Xu explained in the news release.

“We’ve shown that they’re capable of moving much faster than they normally do, without an undue cost on their metabolism,” Xu said in the release. “This reveals that jellyfish possess an untapped ability for faster, more efficient swimming. They just don’t usually have a reason to do so.”

The jellyfish didn’t show any signs of stress with the device, the news release said.

“The next step will be to develop a system that guides the jellyfish in specific directions and that allows them to respond to signals from onboard sensors, says Dabiri, who hopes to develop even smaller electronic controls that could be completely embedded in the jellyfish’s tissue, making them permanent but unnoticed prosthetics,” the news release said.

This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 3:42 PM with the headline "How bionic jellyfish with tiny prosthetics could reveal the secrets of the deep sea."