Silvia Crespo waits for “deep seas” and only then goes out to fish. When the waters of the Atlantic retreat and leave the seabed bare and exposed, this 53-year-old woman grabs her foz and its capacho and enters the coast of A Guardia, on the border between Galicia and Portugal. You have a few hours to extract the urchin, before the sea returns to claim its land. “With the barnacle you risk a little more because you are where the waves break, and here, well, you still end up in areas with little ports, which are more sheltered,” he explains in a telephone conversation. The extraction of the hedgehog, like that of the barnacle, is a very feminized and artisanal task. “People didn’t give her much value because, of course, she’s tough,” he confesses. Crespo goes into coves, wades into the water up to his waist, looking for the urchins between the cracks in the clearing. He tests them at low tide. But in the coming months, the inclusion of remote-controlled robots and artificial intelligence tools could change her routine and that of all her colleagues.
Researchers from the CSIC of Vigo and the main brotherhoods of A Guardia are working on a project that allows the mapping of the funds in the area. For 18 months, researchers will go to the Vigo and Arousa estuaries to help fishermen detect the urchin in their main fishing grounds. The idea is to quantify and map them, to know the real situation of this species, helping not only its extraction but its survival. “We aim to make a visual tool, a kind of Google Maps with areas in green, yellow and red depending on density,” he explains. Luis Taboadascientist at the Marine Research Institute and head of the project. “The idea is not that they fish more, it is that they fish better.”
The price of the hedgehog has multiplied by four in the last decade. The portion of 12 pieces (more or less a kilo) exceeds 20 euros in fishmongers and 25 in restaurants. But the biggest problem is not its inflation, but its survival: this species takes about five years to reach adulthood and its consumption is increasing. This has been decimating the population in some parts of the coast, such as in Asturias, where the rocks have been cleared to the limit. That is why doing a kind of hedgehog census is important. Not only can they indicate ouriceiras like Silvia where there are many, saving them walks and making their work easier. “It could also serve as tools for administrations to carry out sustainable management of the resource,” says Taboada. In this way, the kilos allowed per day could be increased or reduced depending on the population of the area. You could monitor how the hedgehog patches decrease or grow, study their density and see in which areas they expand more easily.
Named as Perizia, The project involves an investment of just over 300,000 euros. Use a device from the Blue Robotics firm to which those responsible have made some modifications so that it can be controlled remotely or autonomously, recording the seabed with high definition cameras. “This way we will get a lot of videos with which to train and develop artificial intelligence algorithms to identify and count the densities of specimens,” says Taboada. “And this information, georeferenced, we can transmit to the fishermen.”
This can change Crespo’s life. Or that of Ruben Carneiro, although this 32-year-old fisherman is cautious. “Yes, yes, it’s very interesting, but I don’t know, I find it a little complicated to do, you know?” he confesses. The waters in A Guardia are murky and rough, the fog frequent. Hedgehogs usually hide in rock crevices and hard-to-reach nooks. That doesn’t stop Carneiro from going out to sea with his rake and wetsuit and diving in search of urchins. Theirs is not extraction on foot, but submerged. He dives by eye, knows the areas where there are usually urchins and goes there, hoping to fill the bag. Having a map could help you by saving unnecessary dives, gas and effort. It would make your work greener, cheaper and faster. In the brotherhood there is not much talk about the subject yet, he explains. They have just started the extraction season (which occurs in the fall and winter months) and for now they continue with the process in a traditional way, expectant of a project that will begin in a week, last 18 months and that could forever change their way of working.
Taboada defines the project Perizia as “innovative and ambitious”, but it is by no means unique. In recent years, an army of drones has taken to the sea to help with fishing and underwater mapping. Different artificial intelligences are analyzing images to encode the seabed and understand its fauna and flora. This same week, an algorithm was presented, developed by the Azti technology center, that detects the composition of fish schools in the Cantabrian Sea, using information collected during nine years of biomass studies in 60,000 schools. It is one more example of how this technology is becoming an aid for fishing vessels.
The most optimistic estimates They estimate that 9% of the seafloor has been mapped in detail with modern sonar technology. More superficially, about 18% of the global ocean floor has been studied, often at such coarse resolution that even underwater volcanoes have gone undetected. Currently, technologies such as artificial intelligence and unmanned vehicles are making it possible to identify species, warn of what is happening at great depths or capture and analyze the garbage that we dump into the sea. This has obvious implications in fishing, but also on a scientific and humanistic level. Drones are smaller and more humble, but they are helping to shed light on the most unknown corners of the earth, in a revolution in marine knowledge like the one that submarines once represented.
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