SciShow is supported by Dashlane. When you think of rubber ducks, you probably
think of bubble baths, those huge adorable sculptures, or debugging
— if you’re into programming. Or maybe you heard about that study that found
over 9.5 million bacterial cells per square centimeter living inside the average
toy... The point is: they don’t seem all that useful
for much outside the tub. But it turns out that rubber ducks have been
used by scientists in at least three ways — examining everything
from ocean currents and glacial runoff to better wildlife counting
methods. To start, let’s go back to 1992. On January 10th, a cargo ship on its way from China to the
US lost some containers with 29,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys. These plastic critters, called “Friendly
Floatees,” spent at least 10 years drifting in the open ocean, pushed and pulled
along with currents. Some ended up thousands of kilometers from
the original spill site as far north as Sitka, Alaska or washing up
in Scotland nearly 12 years later. Tracking and reporting Floatee sightings became a worldwide citizen science project. The oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer took the
lead in tracing systems of ocean currents called
gyres as they swirled between North America, Asia, and Europe. These oval-shaped vortexes are driven by wind
patterns and the Coriolis forces generated by the Earth’s
rotation. Now, how many of the ducks were found where,
and when, helped Ebbesmeyer and his team learn about
the rotation speed and size of two gyres in the Pacific Ocean. The researchers found that ducks in the North
Pacific Subpolar Gyre took around three years to do a full spin
in the waters between eastern Siberia and southern Alaska. Its neighbor, the North Pacific Subtropical
Gyre, includes roughly 20 million square kilometers
of ocean between Japan and the west coast of the U.S — all
North of the equator. Understanding the rotation of these gyres
isn’t just cool information. It’s important because the vortexes collect
junk like plastic debris in the center, kind of like the bubbles in the center of
your morning coffee as you stir in sugar. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is infamous
for this very reason, boasting a Texas-sized plot of pollution called
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And by understanding gyres better and the movement of plastics that get trapped
by them we might get better at targeting our ocean
cleanup efforts. Now, nearly 20 years after the Friendly Floatees
went overboard, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
intentionally threw 90 rubber ducks into a hole on Greenland’s
Jakobshavn glacier. Specifically, it was a moulin — a hole up
to 10 meters wide that lets melting water seep into and below
the glacier. These intrepid duckies were labeled with the
NASA scientists’ contact information in three languages, along with
a promise of a $100 reward, in the hopes that citizen scientists would
find and report their locations. And these cheap, trackable, floating markers
were supposed to help researchers learn more about where and how
the water flows beneath the ice. Understanding glacial runoff is important,
because melting glaciers contribute to sea level rise, which will eventually threaten coastal cities
with floods. Chunks of glaciers breaking off and glacial
runoff amounts may change seasonally, which we hope to learn
more about. Researchers targeted the Jakobshavn glacier
specifically because it’s where nearly 7% of the ice that’s breaking off
of Greenland comes from. Unfortunately, not a single member of this
duck expedition, or the GPS probe dispatched along with them,
was ever seen again. More recently, scientists used life-size rubber
replicas of generic ducks not the yellow bath toys — to create a wildlife-counting
competition that they called the #epicduckchallenge. In Adelaide, Australia, researchers placed
thousands of duck decoys in 10 colonies on a local beach meant to simulate breeding colonies of the
greater crested tern. And then it was time to count. Trained wildlife spotters used more traditional
counting methods, like binoculars or scopes on tripods, from
around 37.5 meters away to mimic a normal distance that wouldn’t
scare birds away. And they took about 5 to 10 minutes to count,
on average. Other study volunteers, who mostly weren’t
trained ecologists tallied rubber ducks using drone photos instead. These pictures were taken from heights of
30, 60, 90, or 120 meters, and some of them turned out blurry because
of the wind and vibrations. The researchers also tested an algorithm to
count the birds in these photos, which required some human input to pick the
right area and isolate the ducks from the background. And turns out, both kinds of counting with
drone photos were 43-96% more accurate than counts taken
from the ground with kinda blurry photos and between 92-98% more accurate with high-quality
photos. So if we can develop a computer algorithm
to count the wildlife in the photos without our help, that seems like a really
efficient way to take animal census data. And that can help conservationists step in
sooner to help threatened species. And just like a drone and a well-designed
algorithm can count birds much more accurately than I can, I also rely
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I do like
to watch
Hank's
serious
videos
Lol. Just wanted to post this.
interesting!