To secure the prize, the team deployed a camera named ACKBAR (Autonomous Camera for Kraken Baiting and Recording)—to depths reaching over 2,000 feet. In all, they recorded eight hours of high-quality footage and encountered a variety of sea life: chimaera, squid, shrimp, sea stars, siphonophores, jellies, lanternfish, and hagfish. The deep sea is one of the most uncharted and endangered places on Earth. Because of this, ocean depths are highly vulnerable to exploitation and disturbance. From bottom-trawling nets to oil spills and new deep sea mining on hydrothermal vents, Real Deep Conservation VR developed the ACKBAR camera as a low-cost response to such threats to the deep sea.
“This prize was amazingly important for us to develop an easy-to-use camera platform that could disrupt the outrageous costs of deep-sea research. Now we want to use it to find real, living sea monsters and protect them.”
The $20,000 Con X Tech Grand Prize is awarded by Conservation X Lab, and is a global conservation technology prototyping competition. Conservation X Labs’ mission is to apply technology, entrepreneurship, and open innovation to source, develop, and scale critical solutions to the underlying drivers of human-induced extinction.