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If the lucre could talk , what would they say ? Surely we all ask ourselves this head every twenty-four hour period . But a Gallic inauguration is hold up further , allowing lamellibranch like clams , mussel and oyster to act as all - natural water quality inspectors . MolluSCAN was showing off its techthis twelvemonth atCES 2024 in Las Vegas .
The company began as a inquiry project some 15 years ago at the University of Bordeaux . CEO and co - founder Ludovic Quinault and his team were looking into monitoring the wellness of bivalves , a category of marine animals found all over the world in both fresh and salt water . As largely stationary filter tributary , they are quite in melody with their milieu , and their substance abuse are affected by things like temperature , defilement and so on .
Quinault detect that a dewy-eyed , non - invasive sensor attached to the clam or oyster ’s shell can monitor everything from feeding to reproductive memory and stress responses like suddenly shutting or failing to give at the normal meter . These in turn are excellent predictor of various qualities in the water , and can act as an early warning system of rules for problem like toxic substances . The mollusc does n’t know whether it ’s closing because of crude oil remainder or an alga bloom , but it intuits that the urine is unsafe for spirit and shuts up . In fact , Ludovic has find that they are exceedingly sensitive to small changes that chemical analysis may not even pick up reliably .
That ’s one signal among many that can be told by supervise bivalves , and after more than a decade of research , Quinault and his squad are aiming to market the applied science , forming molluSCAN in March of 2023 .
Water quality is of course very crucial to governments , park rangers and many industries , but the process of try and testing it is seldom commodious . It ’s unremarkably impractical to put examination apparatus at multiple places in a body of water , so usually hoi polloi have to go out and gather samples , then bring them to a central location to be analyzed .
The molluSCAN - eye system wo n’t interchange traditional water monitoring , but as a living part of the pee ecosystem , its wellness and the health of its surroundings are closely join . So oysters doing well in one branch of a river but not another , or mussel suddenly snarl shut out in some places after a release — both these are complementary signals to ordinary testing and could also help oneself verbatim resource to places where they are in particular needed . The organization that supervise clusters of animals is all self - incorporate and can lock without any sustenance for more than three years , he said .
Since their first appearance last spring , molluSCAN has landed two regular customers and has three more in talks , though they also have over a dozen scientific discipline - focused installment around Europe . Quinault is hoping that municipality and natural resource authorities will shell out for the tech as a whole rude , harmless and low - touch way to watch their waterway .
