Biologist David Gruber dives deep underwater to study all kinds of marine animals. But there’s one creature that time and again gives him headaches: jellyfish. When jellyfish are captured in nets, their squishy bodies break apart. That makes it hard to examine the animals up close. “Jellyfish are fragile,” Gruber says. “If you touch them, sometimes they fall apart.”
To help solve the problem, Gruber worked with a team of engineers to build a device that can trap sea creatures without harming them. The device looks like a claw with five arms. The claw is 20 inches wide when it’s open. A small motor delicately folds the arms shut, encasing jellyfish and squid inside an 8-inch-wide dodecahedron, a 12-sided shape. It’s like a Poké Ball—the tool to catch the beloved monsters in the Pokémon video games—but for marine animals.
Biologist David Gruber dives underwater to study ocean animals. But there’s one creature that often gives him trouble: jellyfish. Jellyfish have squishy bodies. If Gruber catches them in nets, they often break apart. That makes it hard to examine the animals up close. “Jellyfish are fragile,” Gruber says. “If you touch them, sometimes they fall apart.”
Gruber worked with a team of engineers to help solve this problem. They built a device that can trap sea creatures without harming them. The device has five arms arranged into a circular claw. The claw is 20 inches wide when it’s open.
To catch an animal, a small motor carefully folds the arms together. They close to form a container 8 inches wide. The container is a shape called a dodecahedron. That means it has 12 flat sides. The device is similar to a Poké Ball—the tool to catch creatures in the Pokémon video games. But instead of catching Pokémon, it catches jellyfish and squid!