I found this article[1] answered allot of the questions I was left with after reading the linked article.
> “What we normally do is put a satellite transmitter on any animal that we deploy instruments on. In this case, we didn’t, because we expected this (camera) just to be gone at sea for a couple of days,” said Lidgard in an interview Friday.
> “With hindsight, probably not a good idea,” he added with a laugh.
> The idea, he said, was to deploy the camera four or five times, each time removing it from the seal to get the data after a few days and reattaching it to continue the research.
> In this case, Lidgard said he thinks the seal was starting to go through the moulting process and was foraging for food when the camera fell from its back.
You say this but I know way too many people who have English as their first and only language who make silly mistakes. And when you mention the correct way to say/write something _you're_ an asshole. No, I'm trying to help you!
On the one hand, yes; on the other hand, it’s kind of fun to watch, in real time, the same sort of linguistic shift that means that the word “orange” doesn’t begin with the letter n.
You'd need a huge battery to power a camera for that long, as well as enough storage to match.
Let's assume something at the low end of the quality scale, e.g. 1Mbps 480p H.264; that's 125KB/s, or roughly 11TB for 3 years of video. Likewise, take 5W as an average power consumption. 5W for 3 years turns out to be around 130kWh, which is a large capacity even for an EV battery. For comparison, the largest Tesla has 100kWh.
It definitely looks 3d printed, although the layer resolution is quite fine and the print quality is very good, and it hasn't been obviously damaged after 3 years in the sea, so I expect this is not printed in PLA on a home 3d printer.
Searching for "lidgard underwater camera", I found this blog post, which has more pictures but no explanation of how it was made: https://lidgardphotography.com/tag/sable-island/ - I still think it looks clearly 3d printed.
Unexpected to me. As a seal, I like my chances escaping from a wolf on a rock better than from a shark on the ocean floor. I can escape land predators by jumping into the water, but I can’t escape aquatic predators unless I happen to be able to outswim them to some nearby land mass.
> “What we normally do is put a satellite transmitter on any animal that we deploy instruments on. In this case, we didn’t, because we expected this (camera) just to be gone at sea for a couple of days,” said Lidgard in an interview Friday.
> “With hindsight, probably not a good idea,” he added with a laugh.
> The idea, he said, was to deploy the camera four or five times, each time removing it from the seal to get the data after a few days and reattaching it to continue the research.
> In this case, Lidgard said he thinks the seal was starting to go through the moulting process and was foraging for food when the camera fell from its back.
No video footage there either sadly.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/10/08/lost-seal-mou...