Transcript – AANS Eider Duck Project

Interview with Matt D’Entremont and Fernando Salazar
Innovation in Design
2m23s

[Matt]“My name is Matt D’Entremont, I am the director of the iDLab at Dalhousie University.”

[Fernando] “And I’m Fernando Salazar, Research and Development coordinator for the Aquaculture Association of Nova Scotia.”

[Fernando] “One of the purposes for the Association in this project is to develop these technologies that would be inexpensive and accessible.”

[Matt]The equipment we developed consists of a hydrophone, a microprocessor unit, and a camera unit.  The camera unit is for us to take a look at positive triggers and negative triggers and basically to log the information as it’s being captured.

Aquaculture industry, this product is of great commercial interest, because an 8 kg. duck eats 20% of its body weight in mussels per day.  The challenge is that each duck can swim down 60 feet underwater to basically dislodge its mussels that it wants to eat but also it creates others to fall off the line and then they’re not easily recovered. 

If they go back to their nests and say, “hey, I found a great place to eat,” then they can bring 20, 000 friends, and then 20, 000 friends can create a large amount of damage.  The damage can be 30% to 40% of the farmer’s yield, which is quite important if it takes three years to grow mussels.”

[Sound of Matt blowing the duck call device]

[Matt] “The hydrophone, when it’s underwater, senses the sound as vibrations and takes that vibration and convert it into electrical activity.  When we actually run the duck call, what we are doing is stimulating a vibration that is actually electrically converted, and we can look at the frequency of that interest and determine if it is a duck.”