Do underwater camera traps exist?

[Davide DB]

I know they are very common to film/photograph wildlife on land. What's about them underwater?

[Kraken de Mabini]

I Googled "underwater camera traps" and this popped up:

 

A low-cost, long-term underwater camera trap ...

PLOS

https://journals.plos.org › plosone › article › journal.p...

by SM Bilodeau · 2022 · Cited by 13 — The DEAC camera trap design is a reliable, cost-effective, and easy-to-implement solution allowing the expansion of terrestrial camera trapping ...

 

MantaID : LIDAR based underwater camera trap

Ando Shah

https://ando.xyz › work › manta-id

The world's first underwater camera trap, designed to automatically capture the lives of manta rays and sharks.

 

A low-cost, long-term underwater camera trap network ...

National Institutes of Health (.gov)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › articles › PMC8809566

by SM Bilodeau · 2022 · Cited by 13 — Underwater camera traps proved to be energy-efficient, durable, and capable of producing large volumes of quality images representative of the fish communities ...

 

The Open-source Camera Trap for Organism ...

ScienceDirect

https://www.sciencedirect.com › science › article › pii

by JW Humbert · 2023 — This Open-source Camera Trap for Organism Presence and Underwater Surveillance (OCTOPUS) was designed to operate as a motion activated camera trap, ...

 

Low-cost underwater camera trapping and deep ...

WildLabs

https://wildlabs.net › article › low-cost-underwater-ca...

Nov 30, 2021 — Low-cost underwater camera trapping and deep learning.

[Davide DB]

Thanks Kraken,

I'll check all the links. maybe there's something simple.

I was hoping on something ready on the shelf...

[bghazzal]

This one you can " add to cart"  😉 Not sure about the prices and availability though

https://www.spotx.com.au/underwater-camera-trap/underwater-camera-trap

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by bghazzal

[Nikolausz]

Maybe the cheapest option is to try GoPro labs motion detection. (I have no first hand experience with it but I will try it soon)

[Davide DB]

3 hours ago, Nikolausz said:

Maybe the cheapest option is to try GoPro labs motion detection. (I have no first hand experience with it but I will try it soon)

Time ago I tried with my GP-11 in my kitchen sink with mixed results. it's a shame it doesn't work at 50 fps.

https://gopro.github.io/labs/control/motion/

 

[Nikolausz]

On 12/17/2023 at 10:33 PM, Davide DB said:

Time ago I tried with my GP-11 in my kitchen sink with mixed results. it's a shame it doesn't work at 50 fps.

https://gopro.github.io/labs/control/motion/

 

If it's for your trout project, I would just leave more cameras rolling with big card and just sor out the footage at the end. They will come back and will ignore small cameras.

[Davide DB]

1 hour ago, Nikolausz said:

If it's for your trout project, I would just leave more cameras rolling with big card and just sor out the footage at the end. They will come back and will ignore small cameras.

It's what we made until now. We have 4 GP11 and we leave them until the battery dies. At 4K@50p (everything disabled) they last about 1 hour. Now we are evaluating to buy a digipower re-fuel casel to get 3 hours at least.

These are not normal trouts they are badass trouts 🙂  Nobody was able to film their spawning so far. They are super suspicious: they disappear even if you get 5
meter close to the riverbank. We were only able to film them with gopros left in the water. We also tried with two Panasonic GH5 camouflaged with fake leaves without much results because they seem to be disturbed by such a large object left in the water. Now we have a lot of footage but no spawning!

[Tom Kline]

The links are not links:

 

 

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Posted Thursday at 12:26 PM

I Googled "underwater camera traps" and this popped up:

 

A low-cost, long-term underwater camera trap ...

PLOS

https://journals.plos.org › plosone › article › journal.p...

by SM Bilodeau · 2022 · Cited by 13 — The DEAC camera trap design is a reliable, cost-effective, and easy-to-implement solution allowing the expansion of terrestrial camera trapping ...

 

MantaID : LIDAR based underwater camera trap

Ando Shah

https://ando.xyz › work › manta-id

The world's first underwater camera trap, designed to automatically capture the lives of manta rays and sharks.

[Tom Kline]

I have used VEMCO acoustic tags in my past research. My guess is that the camera trap is triggered when a tagged fish swims by. BTW VEMCO had a diver-held receiver so one could visually confirm the tag was still in the live fish cf. in the stomach of a predator!! In my case I used stainless staples to suture the incision (where the tag was put in).  The staple reflected a dive light rather nicely when we relocated the tagged fish while scuba diving.

[airisfortires]

In Orkney they have some special stuff, don't know, if they just drop it filming all the time or if they only start filming when a movement is detected:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0LiNoGuZppT4W5En4YXsGB6Cf9MugHDQuqM7d6DTbxvmZfkaSKT3yJWXqBG1xayiHl&id=100064456731158

Bob Anderson of Halton Charters is involved.

[Nikolausz]

21 hours ago, Davide DB said:

It's what we made until now. We have 4 GP11 and we leave them until the battery dies. At 4K@50p (everything disabled) they last about 1 hour. Now we are evaluating to buy a digipower re-fuel casel to get 3 hours at least.

These are not normal trouts they are badass trouts 🙂  Nobody was able to film their spawning so far. They are super suspicious: they disappear even if you get 5
meter close to the riverbank. We were only able to film them with gopros left in the water. We also tried with two Panasonic GH5 camouflaged with fake leaves without much results because they seem to be disturbed by such a large object left in the water. Now we have a lot of footage but no spawning!

I feel your frustration. I also observed that even 2 action cameras next to each other distract a bit the fish. Even an Insta360 One X2 in a housing is too large and the double dome is very suspicious, not to mention a bigger system camera (I use sony A6400) in a housing. 

[sharkypeeps]

I'm not sure your budget or goals with respect to this.  I saw mention of a trout project but no general overview of what your trying to do - can you point me to the details on this as I am spit-balling without a lot of background on your specific problem? 

 

Okay with that said, another approach would be to use some housed small cameras that interface directly (yup I'm talking about some cables) to a small computing device.  They could shoot low res video constantly and stream that data to your computing device (if your handy with electronics and coding you could totally DIY this).  Then use the computing device to automatically look at the difference between frames, and once you have a threshold delta, anything above that you would call a possible target of interest.  At this point you could automatically change from low res video to whatever you wanted and actually keep this data. I know this sounds like a lot of work but I have hacked similar stuff like this together before for various lab experiments and some field data collections (while the budget provided by the sponsor was pretty large we tended to hack stuff together pretty cheaply).  If your curious about this approach ping me and we can chat from there.

[wydeangle]

In the film "Chasing Coral" a camera was developed to take time lapse pictures of coral bleaching. Here's a screen capture of one of the cameras:

 

Maybe one like that could be used for capturing other events, maybe with a proximity or motion sensor incorporated?

 

Tom