AUSTRALIAN startup Fumunda Marine is attracting attention from the global scientific community after developing an underwater alarm to protect whales from entanglement in shark nets.
Fumunda Marine is located at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Innovation Centre. It designs and manufactures underwater alarms called Pingers to stop the entanglement of marine mammals in fishing nets.
With the support of the Queensland Government, in 2009 Fumunda was able to design a new low frequency Pinger specifically aimed at warning migrating Humpback whales to the presence of shark nets off Australia’s east coast.
The technology resulted in a significant reduction in whale entanglements, with 2010 and 2011 seeing only one whale entanglement per year, where the animals were successfully released.
With scientific estimates finding the number of whales migrating up and down Australia’s east coast increasing by 10 percent annually, the reduction in whale entanglement numbers due to the Pingers is even more significant.
The use of Pingers has the potential to save many of the 300,000 marine mammals estimated that are caught and drown in fishing gear around the world every year. The support of the government has brought attention from governments and scientists in South Africa, Portugal, Ecuador, Tanzania, and the USA.
In recent months, the company has signed distribution deals for Denmark, United Kingdom, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland and Alaska.
