Exploiting the Unexploited: A Smart Panel System for In-situ Detection of Adult Sea Lamprey
Sponsor: Great Lakes Fishery Commission (Sea Lamprey Research Program)
PI: Prof. Xiaobo Tan, Co-PIs: Christopher Holbrook (Hammond Bay Biological Station, U.S. Geological Survey), and Chuan Wang (Electrical & Computer Engineering).
Invasive species control and assessment strategies often seek to exploit species-specific behaviors or traits. Simply put, adult sea lampreys suck like no other organisms in the Great Lakes. However, this characteristic has not been directly exploited to enumerate or control sea lampreys. A low-cost smart panel capable of sensing, recording, and possibly responding to sea lamprey attachment could enhance selective fish passage devices (e.g., triggering localized electrical stimulus to repel or deter a lamprey), spearhead new research to address critical gaps in sea lamprey life history and ecology (e.g., refuge-seeking behavior and habitat characteristics, stream entry timing), and have broad-ranging applications to sea lamprey assessment and control (e.g., new trapping system design).
This project aims to design, develop, and test a low-cost portable smart panel system that autonomously (1) senses when an adult sea lamprey has attached to the panel, (2) records and transmits event data (time, pressure statistics, event duration), and (3) triggers auxiliary mechanisms, for example, activating a localized electric field to repel the attached lamprey. The proposed smart panel will have a modular architecture – they can be deployed individually at spots of interest (stream entries, trap sites, refuge habitats) or assembled into a larger panel for deployment at places like dams. The panel could incorporate an attractant (e.g., pheromone polymer emitter) to enhance encounter and attachment rate. Wireless cellular data module could remotely transfer data in near real-time from field to office.