How a Half-Dozen Raspberry Pis Help Keep This Maine Oyster Farm Afloat
Running Tide Technologies is an oyster subcontract with an eye on climate alter. It does carbon sequestration by growing kelp and its 30 employees include software developers, instrumentation engineers, fabricators, and a information scientist who wrote her doctoral thesis on the impact of sea surface dynamics on ocean nutrients.
"We put oysters in our system, we grow them, nosotros learn nigh what the oysters like and don't like and then we adjust our gear accordingly," said Marty Odlin, the Maine-based startup'due south 38-twelvemonth-old founder. "And so it's just this big iterative cycle where nosotros heed to what the water tells us and to what the oysters tell the states."
Odlin relied on that iterative process just a few years out of Dartmouth, when he put his applied science degree to use and started a bamboo bike concern in New York, which guided people as they built their ain bamboo bicycles over the course of a weekend. After Odlin closed down Bamboo Bike Studio, he went home to Maine and worked in the family commercial fishing business concern. More than a dozen relatives—including his father, uncles, and cousins—have captained commercial fishing vessels over 4 generations.
"They're pretty amazing people," Odlin said. "They tin get out in the center of the body of water and pull food out of the water confronting amazing odds. And they do it over and over again."
Odlin is also pulling food out of the water, only he doesn't accept to leave to body of water to do it. Running Tide takes its proper name from the effect tides take on how oysters feed. When the tide is running, they open their shells to filter plankton and algae from seawater, resting in between the tides with their shells closed. Running Tide designed and fabricated 4-ton aluminum oyster reefs that take a propeller to send water from one end of the barge-similar structure to the other, creating the upshot of a running tide.
"Then what this does is during the times when there'south slack h2o, we can run a propeller and keep the oysters fed," explained Odlin.
Running Tide's oyster reefs were congenital inside a cavernous edifice that was in one case function of the Brunswick Naval Air Station. Known as TechPlace, it'due south now dwelling house to other start-ups, including ane business that makes tidal power generators and some other that articles floats for ocean planes.
Running Tide used a h2o jet cutter to shear off pieces of aluminum for its oyster reefs. "We try to eliminate plastic in all of our farms [and] apply as many ocean-friendly materials equally possible," Odlin said.
Running Tide built a lx-past-24-foot oyster processing boat, now docked in a finger of Casco Bay in the town of Harpswell, with ii oyster reefs floating at each end of the vessel. Within the processing boat are a half-dozen Raspberry Pis that feed data to the cloud on h2o weather condition, including temperature and acerbity. The gunkhole is essentially a huge catamaran that allows the 11-by-36-human foot oyster reefs to bladder into it.
Running Tide'due south Margaux Filippi, who has a PhD. from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Found, said the company is working on underwater video cameras to monitor the oysters' growth. The 29-year-old data scientist has built machine learning algorithms for bounding main research and spent six years at MIT'south mechanical engineering department, where she mastered the process of rapid prototyping. She clearly enjoys Running Tide'due south hacker culture.
"You don't often have people with loftier engineering science credentials who likewise take feel with marine environments," Filippi said. "When you build for off-shore conditions, it'southward very different than building for an office space or an environment that'south going to exist controlled. Our team is very adaptable and proficient at improvising solutions for the marine surround."
Filippi is hopeful that the various sensors in the h2o with Running Tide's oysters will enable her to forecast harmful algae blooms that could doom the shellfish.
"If nosotros have a lot of sensors and we're able to runway trends, and then we may be able to predict in real time that an algae blooms is going to occur and then heighten the [oyster] beds out of the water so the oysters don't get contaminated," Filippi said. "Oysters are calcifying organisms and the ascension in acerbity in seawater can be a hurdle for oysters to build their shells, so that's something we're also monitoring very closely."
Within the Hatchery
The use of sensors to monitor the growing environment starts in Running Tide's oyster hatchery and plant nursery, where the company too grows algae. The two waterfront buildings accept complex plumbing systems and an well-nigh sci-fi feel to them. One visitor recently took in a row of 4-foot-tall fiberglass cylinders filled with light-green and orangish algae growing and quipped that they looked like they were full of wheat juice and apricot nectar.
Karl Eschholz runs the hatchery. He wore orange safety boots that seemed to match i of the tanks of algae. The lanky shellfish manufacture veteran sees himself every bit more of a farmer than biologist because he has to do a lot of plumbing, carpentry, and electric work.
"Everything we practice is life support for something and you really demand that assortment of skills to do information technology," Eschholz said. "Someone who has a straight research groundwork might not know what to do if a pump fails."
Eschholz showed off a bunch of sensors that measure pH, relative humidity, CO2, and dissolved oxygen. And he can monitor it all on his smartphone. "I find that really incredible," he said. "I've never had that before at any of the five hatcheries where I worked before coming here."
Likewise in the realm of the incredible is Running Tide's plan to start kelp micro farms that volition suck carbon out of the atmosphere. The appeal of kelp is that it can store up to 20 times more carbon per acre than forests on terra firma.
Running Tide plans to sink bio-degradable buoys and the kelp growing from their lines 10,000 feet or deeper, where the carbon volition be sequestered for centuries. A small subset of the buoys will be equipped with GPS trackers and satellite modems; they'll exist retrieved by gunkhole.
Odlin said the company hopes to starting time sending the kelp buoys out to sea in December or January. The method for sinking the buoys is withal existence developed. But each buoy volition have a plug that will slowly be worn down by the bounding main, making a hole that sinks it. Remotely operated vehicles will be used to determine whether the buoys have sunk.
Earlier this month, Shopify announced it volition fund Running Tide's kelp project to fight climate change. Information technology declined to provide details of the funding, but Stacy Kauk, director of Shopify's Sustainability Fund, said, "We'll also fund future deployments when the fourth dimension is right to scale."
Odlin and his wife Justine have two young sons, so they're acutely aware of the perils climate alter poses for their kids' futurity. Although Running Tide is a for-profit enterprise, a critical part of its mission is to restore coastal ecosystems and help ameliorate what is arguably a climate nightmare, a ending Odlin has taken to referring to as Godzilla.
"Godzilla is coming," he said equally he sat outside on the deck of his home. "There are fires in California and the Greenland ice sheet is melting and the Arctic'due south going to take water ice-free summers very soon. The earth'south kind of going haywire right now. I but want to impale Godzilla."
Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/news/39286/how-a-half-dozen-raspberry-pis-help-keep-this-maine-oyster-farm-afloat
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