#awinewith Alicia Dunn: saving kelp forests with underwater drones
✨ Thank you to IP Australia for supporting the SPARK podcast and women in business ✨
What if the tool that saves Australia's underwater forests is a drone with a job to do? Alicia Dunn, founder of Down Deep Drones, is using underwater drones with tools attached to fight the invasive sea urchins devouring our kelp forests. In this episode she explains why kelp matters as much as the Amazon, how a camping-ground conversation turned into a world-first technology business, and what it takes to sell a solution to a problem most people have never heard of.
Why do kelp forests matter (and why are they disappearing)?
Kelp is the ocean's version of the Amazon: a carbon sink that soaks up our emissions and a nursery ground for fish. But overfishing has stripped out the natural predators that keep sea urchins in check, and the urchins are eating the kelp bare. "Urchins eat too much kelp, their natural predators are not there, there's no way of stopping them, they are beyond the reach of divers, and so underwater drones are it." In Tasmania alone there are an estimated 30 million invasive urchins, each munching through 45 grams of kelp.
How do you sell a solution to a problem nobody knows exists?
Alicia's honest answer: education first, sales second. "First of all, there has to be a level of education. Research organisations and governments hold the purse strings, and they're the ones that actually see what needs to be done." Her way in is the pain factor: fishing and tourism industries can see exactly how much money urchin barrens are costing them, so sustainability stops being abstract and becomes revenue protection.
Where does the money come from for a mission-led business?
Not always where you'd expect. Down Deep Drones won a $35,000 grant from the Abalone Industry Reinvestment Fund, an industry body protecting its own future, and IMAS, one of the world's premier marine research organisations, gave them five days on their research vessel with divers and support to write up the research. As Danielle and Alicia discuss, sometimes the fastest path to funding runs adjacent to government: the industries losing money from the problem often move faster than the departments responsible for it.
Can a two-person business go global?
Alicia thinks so, and the plan is wild: AI-piloted drones that a trained operator can fly from anywhere. "Imagine that someone in New York can log in to our underwater drone in Australia and operate it." Nail the process at the smallest scale, make it replicable across languages, cultures and urchin species, and a two-person operation on a boat in Tasmania becomes global infrastructure for ocean repair. They already have the world's first marine debris collecting underwater drone.
Alicia's one piece of advice for women in business
Believe in yourself, and know your capabilities, but don't take them for granted. Then borrow everyone else's. "There are experts out there. Never be afraid to ask, and people are very helpful. If you just ask a bunch of people, hey, can you help me? Nine times out of ten, they will." Asking isn't failure, it's collective knowledge: seek out mentors, take the advice that fits, and accept that nobody gets to be an expert at everything.
Meet Alicia Dunn, Down Deep Drones
Alicia Dunn is the founder of Down Deep Drones, an underwater drone business protecting the marine environment with drones that don't just observe but do jobs: culling invasive urchins beyond diver depth and collecting marine debris. She runs the business alongside partner John Griffiths ("he's the science, I'm the sales"), and is currently delivering an urchin-control research project in Tasmania with IMAS, backed by the Abalone Industry Reinvestment Fund.
You can find her here:
Full transcript
Danielle: So good! Alicia, welcome to Spark TV!
Alicia: Thank you very much, Dani, very happy to be here.
Danielle: I am so happy to be talking to you today, and I am so jealous of your gorgeous background. You are just sitting in the most beautiful part of the world. Where are you right now?
Alicia: So currently we're just near Surfers Paradise, and we tend to go to beautiful parts of the world because we have an underwater drones business. We're about to go to Binalong Bay, which has been voted the most beautiful beach in Australia.
Danielle: Oh my god, how nice! To have a business that takes you to gorgeous places around the world.
Alicia: Exactly, yes.
Danielle: Oh, that's so beautiful. I love it. You've inspired me to get out of the house today, so if anything, this podcast is a win. So, on that note, let's tell everyone who you are and what you do.
Alicia: Alicia Dunn, I have Down Deep Drones, which is an underwater drones business to help the environment by using underwater drones with tools attached, to help with invasive species and marine debris.
Danielle: Wow. So, okay, when I think about drones, I think about my husband's drone that he flies in the air for fun and takes photos of things. So talk to me about an underwater drone. Is it a similar idea, or what's it all about?
Alicia: Well, it's a similar idea. It's getting a robot to do something, whether it's inspection or observation. Where we've taken it one step further is that we have small underwater drones that do jobs, and we attach tools to them. There are aerial drones that do a similar thing, particularly for crops and agriculture, but also for monitoring forests and other beautiful things in nature, just to make sure that everything's doing well. So with what we're doing, it's very similar. We're protecting kelp forests, which are like the rainforests we see on TV, particularly the Amazon, that are getting depleted. Kelp forests around the world are getting depleted, and so we're using our underwater drones with tools to protect those kelp forests from invasive species that are eating too much kelp. So, yes, similar, but different.
Danielle: I love it. And so, talk to me about why kelp is so important.
Alicia: Kelp is a carbon sink, so what that means is that it's doing a very important job for us. All our carbon emissions, we need to nullify those, and having kelp forests, that gets done. The more the kelp is diminishing, the more carbon there will be in the atmosphere. And they're also a nursery ground for fish and other species. They're very important.
Danielle: So, are you telling me that, okay, humans are here, we're kind of doing awful things and destroying the planet, but the natural world is doing its best to filter and help us do our thing, but that's actually being eroded as well? So our natural way of counteracting humans' impact on the planet is now diminishing.
Alicia: Exactly. You've got it in a nutshell. Because we're fishing too much species, the normal predators that keep everything in balance and in check are being overfished. As a result, the balance is out of whack, to put it in a non-science-y term. And then things like this happen. Urchins eat too much kelp, their natural predators are not there, there's no way of stopping them, they are beyond the reach of divers, and so underwater drones are it.
Danielle: Wow. So how on earth did you get into underwater drones?
Alicia: Quite a bizarre way, actually. So I'm not a scientist at all, although I've had a very steep learning curve doing this business, as you'd expect. I was managing a camping site, and someone that was camping there was working on underwater drones, and he had one that he'd made in his boot. And I'm like, what does this do? I've never seen it. How is it different from aerial drones? All the questions that we all have. And I was enthralled by it, and decided to work with him. He's now my partner, his name is John Griffiths.
Danielle: Gets the best of us.
Alicia: Yes. Snapped him up, and yeah, we're working together. So he's the science, I'm the sales, but I am shining a light on his work. And whilst it's my business and I have full autonomy, John and I decide what projects we're going to do together, and it's a beautiful synergy.
Danielle: Wow, that's incredible. So thinking about your comment, you're the sales side, he's the science side: how is it working in a business where you actually have a mission? Oftentimes businesses are out there trying to solve problems, but they tend to be micro-problems. I want to help this person get more sales, I might be a marketing agency or a marketing software. You're kind of solving a micro problem. You're really trying to solve a macro world sustainability problem. How do you build a business around that?
Alicia: It's quite difficult, because people don't realise what the problem is. So first of all, there has to be a level of education. Research organisations and governments hold the purse strings, and they're the ones that actually see what needs to be done, and they're the ones that actually pay us. And so whilst we're doing everything that we can to recommend that people go easy and don't deplete the resources they have available to themselves, it's also a mission to educate government, to let them see that this emerging technology is now available to them. This problem has existed for 25 or 30 years all over the world, in at least 15 countries that we know of, and there are a lot of third world countries that you don't hear about, and they can't do anything about it. So it's being able to make it a match for what their goals are. As far as fishing industries and tourism go, it's very important. They can see how much money is getting lost as a result, and so that's where our value comes in. What is the pain factor? What is causing the most problems? Everybody's income stems from sustainability and looking after our resources, particularly in Tasmania, where we're doing the current project.
Danielle: Wow, that's incredible! I think about, as a business owner, I've had multiple types of businesses, and I've always operated in a way where there's been a huge market, so I could send 100 emails a day, every day if I wanted to. But I feel like your targets, if you said 15 countries, realistically you've got 15 governments that you have to lobby to try and help them understand what's going on, and try and get a slice of their budget for that term, whenever they're in office.
Alicia: Well, the good news is that they're actually spending a lot of money on divers in the water. They can get to some of the urchins, but not all of them. For example, Port Phillip Bay has invasive urchins, and they're overtaking everything just down to 2 metres. You can actually see them very clearly, and they've just spent, sorry, $50 million to get $90 million benefit.
Danielle: Wow.
Alicia: Yes, so big money is being spent. We only need a fraction of that.
Danielle: Yeah, that's right, you heard it here first. I mean, it's just super fascinating. So how do you even go about contacting a government agency to talk to them about solving this problem?
Alicia: What we did was contact an abalone association. They have depleting numbers of abalone every year, and so they have massive pain. They're losing their revenue. And the more time goes by, the more these urchins are eating the kelp, and then the abalone is not able to survive as a result. 45 grams of kelp gets eaten by one urchin, and particularly in Tasmania, there's 30 million of them, so the longer it goes, the worse it gets. And so they have tremendous foresight, and in fact we were given a grant last year from the Abalone Industry Reinvestment Fund. They're trying to find ways to protect their industry, and thankfully they had the foresight to actually see what work we were doing, and to back us. So we got a $35,000 grant. And what also happened, which was brilliant: a research organisation, one of the best research organisations, premier in Australia and also the world, IMAS, they have given us 5 days on their boat, using their divers, and they're going to help us write up the research. So it's a massive win.
Danielle: Yeah, it always fascinates me. I think as an everyday Jo Blogs you think that the government is the be-all and end-all and has your nation's best interest at heart, and sure, let's not make this a politics conversation, but it always fascinates me how sometimes, to get things done, they're not the people that will actually do anything in the short term. There are other parties that you can go to that can almost help you sidestep and make impact in different ways. I live in a small town in WA at the moment, a huge mining town, and things that you think the government or the local council should be taking care of, the mining industries actually step in, because they need the community to exist and be happy. So to get things done, oftentimes it's better to go to the mining companies to get funding, rather than go to council, who you think it should be their responsibility. It just always fascinates me how sometimes, to get things done, to get funding, we need to think a little bit adjacent to where you would think we're going to solve the problem.
Alicia: I totally agree, and I think that we've got it easy, because wherever they're spending money on divers, it's just an added layer of work that needs to be done. We can go a little bit deeper than the divers, we can clear areas that have never been cleared before. So it's a matter of who's helping kelp regenerate, who is planting kelp, and then we can help them by clearing the area for them so that their projects can develop as they wish. So we can find out all around the world what organisations are interested in protecting the kelp, and then just say, here's our evidence. This is our video evidence of what we can do. This is how many we can kill. Not nice to kill a living thing, but it needs to be done.
Danielle: Yeah, that is actually super fascinating. And I would also assume that a diver can only dive so deep and only so long, and they're human, so they need a break. So it would also limit their capability. And also, you've obviously got to pay a diver, so the cost of actually having humans do this job, it just doesn't even make sense anymore when you talk it out loud.
Alicia: Well, that's right, and there is obviously a huge role for divers. Underwater drones can support them, but yes, a lot of the jobs that divers do will be taken over by underwater drones, and unfortunately that's progress. But what they can do is learn how to use underwater drones, and so I'm encouraging all commercial divers to come to me in Tasmania, and we will show them how they can supplement their income very affordably by using underwater drones.
Danielle: Wow, that's so fascinating. It's incredible how we're living in a time where technology can really help us solve a lot of the problems that we've created for ourselves. But what always fascinates me is that you talk it through and think, oh yeah, this is a no-brainer, we've got the technology, we can do this. But you actually have to go out and convince people that this is a huge problem and we need to act now, and we already have the ability to do it. You've just got to fund it.
Alicia: Exactly.
Danielle: Wow, you have your work cut out for you, I am wildly impressed. So what is next for you? You said you were going out on the boat, writing it up with the academics. What does the next 6 to 12 months look like for you?
Alicia: Hard work in Tasmania, out in a very beautiful environment, on a boat, every day, playing with underwater drones. So yes, it will be a lot of fun, but we have to get 60 hours of video together of what the underwater drones are doing to prove that we have efficacy, that we can actually do what we say we're doing, and how quickly we can do it. And then present it to whomever's interested and say, yes, we can protect that precious area. It might be a small part, but at least we can clear it, we can save that little bit of paradise, and encourage fish to breed and kelp to grow.
Danielle: Wow, that is incredible. And when we started this conversation, we talked about 15 different countries around the world who have this exact same problem that we know about. Is there a strategy to move internationally, or is the problem just so big here, you're focused on Australia?
Alicia: What we're considering is something that is pushing the boundaries of technology. We are working on artificial intelligence to actually do the job that a remote control operator would do. At the moment when we're doing the work, we're in a boat or on a jetty, and we have a remote controller and we can see a screen, either a tablet, iPad or a computer. Take those things away, and imagine that someone in New York can log in to our underwater drone in Australia and operate it.
Danielle: Wow.
Alicia: So what that means is that we can grow exponentially. It is very possible to be a global business very quickly if we can get it done in the tiniest form, and make sure that all our processes are squeaky clean, that it can be replicated in different languages, in different cultures, with different urchins. They have different characteristics. The ones in Tasmania are long spine, so they're very spiky. And the ones in California are purple, and it's just like a sea of purple, and if you didn't know anything about them, you'd think that they were so incredibly beautiful. A sea of purple, but nothing else can grow. Nothing else can survive.
Danielle: That's incredible.
Alicia: It has to be done, it has to be done quickly, and if we've got the technology and it's proven, I think we're going to have people knocking on our doors. But I'm prepared to do the hard yards too.
Danielle: Wow, that is amazing. How do you stay motivated? It's obviously an incredible mission, but the work you have set out to do is difficult. This isn't just put up a Facebook ad and someone will buy your product. This is really hard work. How do you actually stay motivated to stay in business?
Alicia: Staying in business is tricky, particularly when you've got such a high research and development side of things as we do. Everything that John's done is unique. No one else has those applications. We've got the world's first marine debris collecting underwater drone. But it's difficult, because to shine a spotlight on it, it has to be given the right time in the limelight. We have to showcase it, and we have to spend time demonstrating it. And when we've got these immediate problems that are demanding our attention, it has been an issue, because it's like: what is the worst problem? And the worst problem that we've decided is the urchins, something that we can do something about, either on a small scale or a big scale. The hardest thing for staying motivated is people disbelieving that it's a possibility. And so once again, it's that education thing. But when they see it in the flesh, when they see it on YouTube, they will get it, and it won't be too late. There's still plenty of kelp, and it can flourish and thrive.
Danielle: Wow. I feel like you need a Netflix documentary. As you've been talking, when you said "once they see it on YouTube", I'm like, no, we need to bring in Netflix, and they need to document this process.
Alicia: I put my hand up for that. I love that. That would be amazing, yes.
Danielle: Oh my god, that would be incredible, wouldn't it? Okay, well, we'll work on Netflix for the next one. But I always love to wrap up these podcasts with one last piece of advice. So, reflecting on your time in business, what would be a piece of advice that you would give to another woman on her business journey?
Alicia: I would say believe in yourself. And know what your capabilities are, but don't take them for granted. You can always improve on what you do. There are experts out there, never be afraid to ask, and people are very helpful. If you just ask a bunch of people, hey, can you help me? Nine times out of ten, they will. And it's not a failure. It's bringing in all that collective knowledge. It helps us to be better than what we're doing, and be the best that we could be. So, in a nutshell: seek out people that can mentor you, that can give you advice. You don't have to take all that advice. But there are experts, and we can't be an expert at everything.
Danielle: Oh, I could not agree with you more. You are absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for sharing your journey and your wisdom with the Spark community. That was absolutely incredible, and I just know so many people tuning into this episode will be so inspired to believe in themselves and back their mission, so thank you so much.
Alicia: I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dani.
