My name is Nick Viner. I'm a researcher with the Hakai Institute. Specifically, I work on the geospatial team. Today, I'm here with our ROV which we've named Tilden to go out in False Creek and collect some underwater video and see what's living down there.

So our ROV stands for remotely operated vehicle, which is a bit of a vague term, but in our case specifically, it refers to this robot. This robot is designed to go underwater and collect underwater video. There's some ROVs out there that can do even more than that. They have little grabber arms, water samplers, some you know are built to work on large underwater machinery, but here today we're just here to collect some underwater videos, so that's what this little device does. And it's connected to the boat with a tether and I have a controller and I get a real-time video feed . So I can see what the ROV sees.

It's a pretty amazing little instrument and where I think we're going to collect some really amazing data with it. So ROVs generally are used when you're limited with depth. Scuba divers can only go so deep, and the deeper a person goes, the more logistically difficult it becomes is what with the platform you have to deploy from and the gear you need. Whereas ROVs can kind of circumvent that. You know the ROV we have is a fairly small unit, fairly, comparatively speaking and expensive but it's capable of going down to 300 meters of depth. With very little, you know extra extra work that needs to be done.

Additionally, ROVs can go into areas that are deemed too hazardous for for a person so you know pipe pipe inspections if you've got like a sewer sewer outflow, an ROV can go there where you might not necessarily want to put an actual person. So I think those are kind of the two biggest advantages; The logistical advantages of being able to just go deeper and further without that gear and then the ability to sort of overcome hazards that you wouldn't want to necessarily put a person in. And so while I have heard of you know divers going down, I think for this specific project, the ROV was just chosen as a safer a safer option considering some of the sites were we're going to.

The biggest thing with um with this area I mean we are we are in a bay and we are in an urban area so the two things that really make this more difficult I would say is the the water quality--it's very difficult to have a good line of sight--as well as tidal forces. There's a lot of current that runs in and out of this Bay and you can really feel that when you're down there with the ROV. There's a lot of a lot of boat traffic a lot of other boaters to keep an eye out for, you know the ROV is in the water and there's a tether between it and the boat and if that tether gets caught in anyone's propeller, it's bad news both for us because it's probably going to destroy our tether and for them as that tether is probably going to get caught in their uh propeller and likely break something on their end too. So that's one of the biggest hazards working in this Urban environment that you don't normally experience in a more rural area with less boat traffic.

Also again, the water quality here just isn't quite as nice as what you would get up on the central coast and I can comfortably say that it's probably a result of just the sheer amount of activity going on here. The things that are going in the water compared to what you would see in more isolated water. We've been to six sites so far today, from Science Center here to Habitat Island out to the most of the creek. We've seen halibut, we've seen lots of crabs, we even saw a squid here a bit closer to Science Center which was pretty neat. But we've still got two more days left so there's lots more exciting stuff for go for us to go out there and see.