‘Underwater Pokéball’ easily catches soft seawater creature

Collecting underwater creature is an extremely difficult task due to their fragile and slimy bodies. The existing technology uses a tube with moving caps on both ends or a tube with vacuum suction to catch the aquatic organisms. We can imagine how unpleasant and destructive this can get.

A simpler and less destructive solution is finally here! A polyhedral sample-collection mechanism, an ‘Underwater Pokéball’ which helps the scientists to catch soft-bodied dwellers in the depths of the sea without hurting their soft, fragile bodies during the process of capturing.

The ball is actually a dodecahedron that softly closes to trap the creature inside it. It has a simple mechanical design; a Rotary Actuated Dodecahedron (RAD) that has five 3D-printed “petals”. It is built in such a fashion which allows the petals to close simultaneously from the force applied at the rear panel. This underwater technology is built by Zhi Ern Teoh, a Ph.D. holder from Wyss Institute at Harvard. He and his colleagues came up with this innovative idea to build a mechanism that can effortlessly capture sea creature for scientific studies while taking a Design Engineering class at Harvard.

“The RAD sampler design is perfect for the difficult environment of the deep ocean because its controls are very simple, so there are fewer elements that can break”, said Teoh. The approach is to treat these rare deep-sea organisms with gentleness. Some of these creatures are a thousand years old and deserve proper care. The goal is to encourage the study of underwater aliens without hurting or killing them. After the research is done, the creatures would be safely returned to their natural habitat!