Biologists try anti-terror technology to spy on corals

LA JOLLA, Calif. — Coral ecologists are taking a page out of the national security playbook: facial recognition technology.

Techniques that can pick a terrorist out of a crowd are being adapted for underwater images, producing data on reefs in record time.

“It’s a technology domain whose time has arrived,” said Greg Mitchell, an optical ecologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “There is going to be a huge expansion of our ability to understand what’s going on in these systems.”

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Photo Credit: David Kline.