Installing autonomous seal cameras in the Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean monk seal is, according the marine biologists, the marine mammal closest to extinction in the world. Still according to scientists, there are about 500-1000 individuals left in the Mediterranean sea. One of the problems biologists are facing is their difficulty to approach and study these animals, as the Med monk seals have adapted to an intense historical human hunt by staying as far as possible from humans, and by resting and giving birth in remote caves along the shore. In the past recent years, several monk seals families have been observed in the Sporades islands and in the Ionian islands in Greece.

Following that difficult analytical situation, the Octopus Foundation decided to help the marine biologists and the research in general of this animal by assembling with off the shelves components an autonomous surveillance system that would use the solar energy, Poe cameras, a 3G-4G router, a Raspberry Pi and a very simple Python based program to monitor continously and remotely a single monk seal cave. The idea was to test for at least 6 months this monitoring system on two different caves, with two different configurations to see if a monitoring system that costs less than 2000 CHF could work. If this works, then the idea is to deploy as many of these systems as possible in the entire Mediterranean sea to have maybe, in a couple of years, a better assessment of the monk seal populations.