Robotic grabber catches squidgy deep sea animals without harming them

The deep sea is a challenging place to study wildlife, but a new foldable robotic grabber may make capturing underwater creatures a bit easier. Many deep sea animals, such as jellyfish and their relatives, have fragile bodies. This means catching them using suction or claw-like grabbers, can cause them to break apart, leaving broken pieces to study instead of whole organisms. To counteract this, Zhi Ern Teoh at Harvard University in Massachusetts and colleagues created a robotic grabber based on a regular dodecahedron – a 3D shape built from 12 pentagons. The grabber is used by attaching it to a remote controlled underwater vehicle or another type of submersible.