More experiments with AI generated art. I used multiple tools all built on Stable Diffusion, however I am still refining everything in Procreate and compositing with Photoshop.
Seaweek fanart
Protected species bycatch in the wider Hauraki Gulf region 2019-2020
This OIA request for photos of bycatch by observers on commercial fishing boats was sent August 2022 and answered 24 February 2023 due to technical issues.
Please supply the following information under the Official Information Act (OIA):
1. All photos of the two black petrel caught by snapper longline fisheries between 2019-20 in this map. There are no photos of these captures as the birds were released alive. The priority is to release live birds as quickly as is possible and there may not have been time to take photos. This part of your request is therefore declined pursuant to section 18(e) of the OIA.
2. All photos of the seven flesh-footed shearwater caught by snapper longline fisheries between 2019-20 in this map.
3. All photos of the flesh-footed shearwater caught by minor bottom longline fisheries between 2019-20 in this map.
4. All photos of the white pointer shark caught by snapper longline fisheries between 2019-20 in this map.
5. All photos of the leatherback turtle caught by bigeye longline fisheries between 2019-20 in this map.
6. All photos of the green turtle caught by southern bluefin longline fisheries between 2019-20 in this map.
Please report set nets in the Tāmaki Estuary
I made this sign to help the Tāmaki Estuary Protection Society enforce the set net ban. I am uploading it here so that the map in particular is easily found on the internet.
Set nets are banned in the Tāmaki Estuary. Set nets indiscriminately catch non- target fish species; birds and mammals. There has been a recent increase in illegal set netting in the Tāmaki Estuary, please help protect our fisheries and other wildlife.
If you see a set net within the banned area:
- Please urgently contact 0800 4 POACHER (0800 47 6224)
- Please report the set net location details and any vehicle license plate. Photos and details can be emailed to poacher@mpi.govt.nz
Your kaitiakitanga will be appreciated by generations to come, kia kaha!
Bottom trawling graphics
I recently took part in a science led process to limit the impacts of bottom trawling & Danish seining in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park. I found the narrow scope of the work quite frustrating. The fishing industry knows it has a social license issue with bottom trawling and made a video to address it. The cartoons don’t tackle key concerns with the fishing method. I have made some graphics to point out the key issues focusing on the smaller (<20m) bottom trawlers that scrape the seafloor of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park.
Bottom trawling is a problem for much of New Zealand’s EEZ and beyond. Feel free to download and use the graphics, let me know if you want them at a higher resolution.
Sim-Smith, C., Kelly, S., Lee, S., Kirikiri, R. (2020). State of our Gulf 2020. Hauraki Gulf Forum.
Eayrs S. Craig T. Short K. (2020). Mitigation techniques to reduce benthic impacts of trawling. Report prepared for the Department of Conservation. Wellington, New Zealand: Terra Moana
Calculation: 7,658 Trawls 2016-19. 7,658*13.5km (12-15km per trawl) = 103,383kms / 3years = 34,461kms PA. Length of NZ = 1,600km. 34,461km / 1,600km = 21.5. 21 times the length of Aotearoa.
Pilskaln, C. H., Churchill, J. H., & Mayer, L. M. (1998). Resuspension of Sediment by Bottom Trawling in the Gulf of Maine and Potential Geochemical Consequences. Conservation Biology, 12(6), 1223–1229.
Please sign this petition.
My op-ed on bottom trawling in the Gulf published in Newsroom
Submissions February 2023
Visibility at depth
I made took this series of photos ascending from the seafloor to show how much worse sediment impacts are at depth over mud substrate.
I also made this short video to show the impacts of sediment on a nearby reef
Dredged to death
Fridays closure of the last two tipa / scallop beds in Aotearoa / New zealand will mark an historic moment for our fisheries. It signals the collapse of more than a fishery but an entire ecosystem.
The last commercial mussel was dredged out of the Hauraki Gulf in 1966, after 56 years there are no signs of recovery. We don’t yet know what the fate will be for tipa. The fishery at the top of the South Island has been closed since 2017. If the tipa beds do not recover it will be the best evidence of ecocide in Aotearoa / New Zealand this century.
We need to change our ways. Both recreational and commercial dredging must be banned as per the Hauraki Gulf 2017 marine spatial plan that the government has still not acted on. These fishing methods damage the habitat that the animals grow in.
The result is:
- Dead and damaged non target species and juvenile tipa
- Lost biodiversity and water clearing animals
- Lost habitats for fish especially juvenile fish
- Long term changes to seafloor chemistry
The same impacts are created by other bottom impact fishing methods like bottom trawling and Danish seining which were also to be banned in the marine spatial plan. Short term fisheries closures are not good enough, we need a total ban on these methods.
Central government management actions to date have been irresponsible. Auckland Council did not take action when it was asked.
If the tipa beds do not recover naturally who will pay to restore them?
Freshwater restoration graphics for Auckland Council
I really enjoyed working on these graphics which Auckland Council used for the exhibition stand at Fieldays 2022. They show the diversity benefits of riparian planting, whats best to plant, and the landscape scale benefits of planting. I learnt a lot while working on them, particularly the hidden values of tree roots.
The plastic bottle tripod
From my experiments with underwater tripods I learnt that weight is more important than a wide base for maintaining stability. This is version two of my plastic bottle tripod which I deployed in a gull colony and was pleased with the results. Construction notes:
- Painted 1.5L orange juice bottle (thx Charlies Orange Juice)
- Slit down the side for inserting 5kg of dive weights
- Washers on either side of screw through lid help with stability (flexible plastic lids introduce some wind wobble)
Training my computer to draw birds
Of all the jobs that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace over the next few decades I never thought mine would be top of the list. I got my degree in illustration 20 years ago, since then I have picked up many more skills but I have always been most proud of my ability to draw. I thought it made me more ‘visually intelligent’ than other creatives because of the volume of data an illustrator has to generate. Over the last few months I have been absolutely blown away by three tools, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. These AI tools are so much faster than me, they have more range, and in most cases are just better at drawing than me. If you want to see what they can do checkout this gallery.
The tools do have some limitations, the main one being the sizes of the images they can draw, but most of these will get solved with market demand. Of course the first thing I wanted to know is how good it was at drawing the things I love, New Zealand animals. My ego was quite pleased to see them fail miserably and in quite entertaining ways (go try kiwi here). Here are some examples of white-faced herons (I have chosen a very well photographed species on purpose).
This is mostly because the AI’s have not been trained how to draw these animals. In the above examples MidJourney and Stable Diffusion confuse our native heron (which can also be found in Australia) with a North American Great blue heron. Developers are working on multiple ways for users to be able to train tools to draw specific subjects. One of them (DreamBoth for Stable Diffusion) involves training a model based on 20 or so images. I happen to be a very organised photographer with 2,700 bird photos and 3,300 photos of invertebrates all cataloged by name, place and time. It took me some time to figure out how to do it and it takes a lot of computing power to train the models, here are the 20 photos I used to train my white-faced heron model.
And here are some of the results (good and bad):
You can see there are still some problems but its pretty good! I can easily fix them up to create future works.
I have been using the tools to create components for illustrations (photo bashing). Here is an example that would have taken me ages to draw from scratch.
I’m excited about the tools and think they will make my work better, faster and cheaper.