Eve, the robotic fish.
Credit: SURF-eDNA
The biblical Eve may have been born out of Adam's left rib to help him tend to the animal and plant species of the earth. The new “Eve” is a man-made robotic fish, but she too has a vital species-saving purpose.
Eve, the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) shaped like a fish, runs on pumps hidden inside its body as it swims through Lake Zurich’s waters. It's biggest feature is a filter that collects DNA from the environment, known as “eDNA,” as it swims.
These eDNA particles can then be sent to a laboratory for DNA sequencing to determine the different kind of species that live in the body of water.
Eve the fish was designed by SURF-eDNA, a student-led group that has created a school of soft robotic fish in the last two years. Eve is their latest creation. “All of the animals that are in the environment, they shed their DNA, so there’s DNA floating around that we can find,” Martina Lüthi, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, told CNN.
A master’s student Dennis Baumann told the outlet, "By making Eve look like a fish, we are able to be minimally invasive into the ecosystem that we’re surveying.”
“We can mix, we can mingle in the ecosystem,” he added.
The project has churned out promising prototypes of AUVs that could help scientists investigate what lies beneath in the ocean's mysterious watery depths and their elusive denizens but in a minimally invasive manner. Eve is equipped with a camera to film underwater, and sonar, which when paired with an algorithm, allows it to avoid obstacles.
“We want to build a reliable tool for biologists,” said Baumann, who added that he hopes one day they can scale up their technology, so it is accessible to any scientist who wants to use it. “Maybe we can prevent species from being endangered or dying out.”