Official News page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: ROBOFISH

by Hazed

Not content with taking over our hospitals, now robots are infiltrating schools of fish and being accepted by sticklebacks as one of their own.

The idea is that scientists controlling the robofish can influence the behavior of the school, by getting wild fish to follow the fake. This could be an important advance in studying group behavior and fish migrations.

Robofish is a model fish made from a plastercast of a three-spined stickleback. It is controlled via electromagnets beneath a fish tank, which are moved by a computer program managed by scientists. When they placed robofish in a fish tank with 10 real fish, the team discovered that the model was so realistic it tempted a live fish to follow it.

There's a video of robofish in the tank with the real stickelbacks here.

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