An Australian app which tells beachgoers the chance of them being bothered by bluebottles could be ready by next summer.
Under development by UNSW Sydney, and set to be tested by Surf Life Saving Australia, the new technology aims to predict which beaches, and on what days, bluebottles will wash ashore.
Dr Amandine Schaeffer said researchers were using wind and swell forecasts, knowledge about the creature’s anatomy and oceanography-based maths to build the tool.
Dr Schaeffer said there was still a lot that scientists didn’t know about bluebottles, like when and where they bred.
“Bluebottles are difficult to study in their natural environment and are challenging to sustain in artificial settings like labs,” she said.
“Unlike fish or sharks, which can be tagged in the wild to study their movement, bluebottles are too light and would sink immediately.”
Dr Schaeffer said because the bluebottle doesn’t swim, it could only drift where sea currents and wind took it.
She said understanding how the wind affected bluebottles was crucial to developing a tool that predicted their presence on beaches.
“So the UNSW team created some plastic replicas fitted with radio tracking equipment to see how bluebottles travel from out at sea.”
Dr Schaeffer said the data would be used to work backwards along the devices’ journeys to observe the way they reacted to the different wind, current and swell forces.
“We’re trying to understand how they move with ocean currents, winds and waves, and which conditions bring them to shore.
“Once we know that we can use forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology about ocean currents, wind fields and swell data.
“And the idea is to have a statistical model that is fed with these environmental variables, which will allow us to make predictions about the likelihood of bluebottles being on a particular beach.”
She said, however, it was near impossible, so far, to predict the population dynamics and where the next swarm of stingers would begin from.
“We’re using machine learning to analyse bluebottle sting and observations data to pinpoint when and where the bluebottles reach the Australian coast. And we’re using oceanographic models to understand where the bluebottles begin their journey.”
Professor Schaeffer said the group was working with Surf Life Saving Australia who would start testing it, once the modelling was ready.
She said the plan was to integrate the tool into the Beach Safe app next summer, once it’s operational.
“Then hopefully we will be able to have some kind of warning on the beach the day before – for example, at Bondi Beach there’s a 70 percent chance there’ll be bluebottles the next day.”
