The albatross, cyber spy of the seas

Audio 02:11

By: Dominique Desaunay Follow

For six months, 170 albatrosses from the Crozet, Kerguelen and Amsterdam islands, equipped with radar beacons, have been monitoring the vast areas of the Southern Ocean. These giants of the sea and the air revealed to the French scientists behind the “Ocean Sentinel” project that one third of the vessels encountered by the birds were engaged in illegal fishing.

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Robotic technologies have long conquered maritime spaces. Some underwater machines , by adding wings and propellers to their fairing, even manage to spin, somehow, above the waves. However, drones with their starving batteries prove to be incapable of competing with the most puny albatross, capable of traveling thousands of kilometers in just a few days.

70 g of GPS and radar beacons

This long-distance world champion also has the distinction of following fishing boats in the hope of gorging themselves on fish. Two characteristics that French researchers from the National Center for Scientific Research and La Rochelle University, in collaboration with the teams from the New Zealand nature reserve and Sextant Technology, wanted to take advantage of by transforming our bird into a patrol boat seas .

The first objective of this project, called "sentinel of the ocean", is to identify illegal fishermen who swarm in the French southern and Antarctic seas. To carry out this mission, which has been operational for six months, 170 albatrosses from the Crozet, Kerguelen and Amsterdam islands were equipped with small beacons weighing barely 70 g. The device includes an Argos satellite data transmission system, GPS and the world's lightest miniature radar detector.

Effective winged “cyber-spies”

Our feathered cyber-spies detect echoes emitted by the radars of fishing vessels at 5 km by directly indicating their positions to scientists. If a boat has not activated its automatic identification device, also known as a transponder, enabling it to be recognized in a regulated maritime area, this is probably an indication that illegal fishing is underway . This first full-scale test made it possible to measure the extent of fraud. More than a third of the vessels encountered by birds in international waters were in total violation, also practicing illegal overfishing which destroys marine biodiversity , the researchers found.

More effective than drones and much less expensive than direct observation by satellites, these patrol boats of the winged seas interest today South Africa or the Service of the wild flora and fauna of Hawaii, whose waters abound in filibuster sinners. Fraudulent piracy of the world's maritime natural resources soon to be countered when squadrons of “cyber-spy” albatrosses fly over the world's oceans.

You have questions or suggestions, you can write to us at nouvelles.technologies@rfi.fr .

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