The world's ocean economy is a booming business that provides a bounty of food and resources, but overfishing and the changing climate are threatening fish populations and the fishers who rely on them. 

Around 600 million people depend on the fishing industry to survive, with most of them in developing countries. Overfishing has impacted nearly 40% of global fish stocks, a significant rise from 10% in 1974.

At Lake Chilwa in Malawi, locals haven't had access to data about what's going on underneath the water's surface and have needed a solution to the growing crisis there, according to a Mongabay report. 

"We don't go out in the lake to check what we have where. We go to fish," Anderson Thembwa, a fisher since 1994 and chair of the Lake Chilwa Fisheries Association, told the outlet. "You pull the net and you realize all you have down there are frogs, crabs, juvenile fish and debris."

A new project led by Roee Diamant, head of the Underwater Acoustics and Navigation Laboratory at the University of Haifa in Israel, is helping locals get the information they need to properly manage fish populations. 

"Our project, which we call SOUND, was aimed to solve these problems by in situ measuring number of fish, detecting schools of fish, estimating size of individual fish, thereby the biomass of the fish," Diamant told Mongabay.

To gather that information, scientists deployed an autonomous, solar-powered robot submersible that can roam the waters for five days at a stretch, counting the fish and marking their locations. 

Bottom trawling, which has been used by many developing countries to sample the waters for data, is environmentally destructive and impacts local fish numbers, proving a less useful and sustainable method.

"Making a robot that runs autonomously, not from a vessel but by itself, continuously and without deploying it from a boat or something like that makes our system unique," Diamant said. "What we need is to make fishing sustainable. By using these technological aids, that would help us find the fish. The result would be controlled fishing."

The SOUND Project can help locals preserve marine biodiversity, save time, improve efficiency, and allow fish populations to flourish through proper management. This will help improve long-term food security for nearby communities. 

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During trials, the transparent cylindrical robot was able to detect individual fish as short as 2.4 inches within a 330-foot radius.

Daniel Jamu, a local fisheries expert who worked on another underwater monitoring program, sounded hopeful about SOUND and its data collection abilities when interviewed in the report.

"If the Israel method is successful in identifying and measuring fish sizes and quantity in its natural environment, it will indeed be a game-changer," he said.

Diamant's team plans to provide more SOUND robots to research centers and regulatory authorities across Malawi to gather more feedback and refine the system for further distribution. 

"Our goal is really to make an impact. We want it to be very low cost so that it is affordable," Diamant concluded.

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