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Thread: $307,524: Laser Guided Synchronized Swim Team of Sea Monkeys

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    $307,524: Laser Guided Synchronized Swim Team of Sea Monkeys

    WASTEBOOK 2014

    Synchronized
    Swimming for Sea
    Monkeys
    $307,524


    Kids around the world are disappointed to learn that the sea
    monkey family in the advertisements is a little different than
    the result.

    Sea Monkeys have captivated Americans for generations and now scientists are trying to determine the impact of the
    swirl created by the synchronized swimming of these tiny sea creatures may have on the flow of the ocean.
    Sea Monkeys are guided to swim in a synchronized direction
    in this tank to measure the swirl of their collective motion.


    Sea Monkeys have captivated Americans
    for generations. The novelty pets, which are
    tiny brine shrimp, have been regular features
    on toy store shelves and advertisements on the
    pages of comic books since the 1960s. NASA
    even launched Sea Monkeys into space with
    John Glenn in 1998.


    Cartoon-style ads for pet Sea-Monkeys
    promise that you can learn to “make them ap
    pear to obey your commands, follow a beam
    of light, do loop-the-loops and even seem to
    dance when you play” music.


    The New York Times says it is “sort of true” that Sea Monkeys
    can be trained because they do follow light.

    With the financial support of three govern
    ment agencies, researchers put these claims
    to the test and essentially choreographed a
    laser guided synchronized swim team of Sea
    Monkeys as part of a study to measure the
    swirl created by their collective movements.
    Flashing blue and green laser lights lure
    the aquatic creatures to move in the same di
    rection within an aquarium. “The green laser
    at the top of the tank provides a bright target”
    as “a blue laser rising along the side of the
    tank lights up a path to guide them upward.”

    The spinning of “silver-coated hollow glass
    spheres” in the water is tracked with “high-
    speed camera and a red laser” measures how
    the Sea Monkey’s “swimming causes the sur
    rounding water to swirl.”

    “Coaxing Sea-Monkeys to swim when
    and where you want them to is even more dif
    ficult than it sounds,” said John Dabiri, one of
    the project’s researchers and a professor at
    California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

    “It turns out that the collective swim
    ming motion of Sea-Monkeys and other zoo
    plankton—swimming plankton—can generate
    enough swirling flow to potentially influence
    the circulation of water in oceans,” according
    to the researchers. They conducted a similar
    study with jellyfish in 2009 and reached similar
    conclusions showing “small animals can gen
    erate flow in the surrounding water.”

    “Adding up the effect of all of the zoo
    plankton in the ocean—assuming they have
    a similar influence—could inject as much as a
    trillion watts of power into the oceans to drive
    global circulation, Dabiri says. In comparison,
    the winds and tides contribute a combined two
    trillion watts.”

    But “some oceanographers are skeptical of
    the claim that the movements of organisms con
    tribute significantly to ocean circulation” because
    “it’s a conceptual leap to go from a tankful of
    Sea-Monkeys to oceans filled with plankton.”

    Christian Noss, an environmental phys
    icist at the University of Koblenz-Landau in
    Germany, is “not convinced the effect would
    scale up from the laboratory to the ocean.” He
    acknowledges “the study was well designed”
    but notes “unlike water in a small tank, water in
    the ocean is often stratified, with denser layers
    lying underneath lighter ones. Noss’s work with
    another tiny crustacean, known as Daphnia,
    showed that stratified conditions dampened
    the mixing produced by these animals.”

    The Sea Monkey researchers are planning
    more realistic studies, such as using “a tank
    with increased water density at the bottom,
    which imitates real-life ocean conditions.”

    Dabiri also “plans to test the stratification
    question and hopes to perform the same ex
    periments at a larger scale in the ocean.”
    Of course, the subjects of this study are
    not actually monkeys with fins and gills, but
    rather brine shrimp, which were given the
    moniker “Sea Monkeys” because their tail re
    sembles a monkey’s tail.”

    The tiny animals
    are about half an inch long with “about 10 small
    leaf-like fins that flap about.”

    The Sea Monkey study was funded by the
    National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office
    of Naval Research with support from the U.S.-
    Israel Binational Science Foundation.

    The NSF
    funding is part of a $307,524 collaborate research
    grant that runs through February 2015.

    With kits available online and many toy stores, you can try to train your own team of
    synchronized swimming Sea Monkeys for as little as $12

    http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/...1-078b69f1f800
    Last edited by presence; 10-22-2014 at 08:02 AM.

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