Environment

The Bronx river is not a New York neighbourhood where you expect to find a celebrity. But José is no ordinary celebrity. He's the first beaver to live in the Big Apple for 200 years – and now you can text him to find out how he's doing.

The artists, engineers and designers of the Environmental Health Clinic at New York University have deployed buoys in the Bronx and East rivers that show the public what the city's submerged wildlife is up to.

The buoys – tubes that emerge just above the surface and hang down a couple of metres below – are equipped with sonar that detects moving fish and mammals, and sensors that provide information on water quality, such as the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. Distinct sonar signatures reflected from the different animals allows species to be identified.

The aquatic life creates a light show above water that mirrors the animals' movements: each time an animal passes by, a blue diode lights up at the top of the buoy – see video here.

Fishy business

But you don't have to be nearby to benefit. The information can also be transmitted by text message to anyone with a US phone.

Over the next month, New Yorkers will be invited to text "EastRiver" or "BronxRiver" to 41411: they will be informed of the number and species of fish that are moving around the arrays at that moment.

And there's a twist: the text messages read as though the animals themselves had sent them. So at 1.52 am on Friday, a herring in the East river texted New Scientist: "It's pretty nice down here." Dissolved oxygen, apparently, was higher than the week before.

When we checked conditions across town in the Bronx, we got a message from José – named after José Serrano, the Bronx congressman who has supported work to clean up the river: "Just swung by the art centre. Water feels good. The dissolved oxygen must be pretty high today."

Project leader Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist, an engineer and director of the Environmental Health Clinic. She wants to eliminate the "do not disturb" approach to urban environments and instead encourage people to interact with their natural surroundings in an informed way.

"People look at the rivers and just see a mirror surface," Jeremijenko says. She hopes that her project will reveal the water's "insides" to the public and make them more curious about it. She also hopes that by "interacting" with the fish and texting the buoys regularly they might become more familiar with the water conditions that encourage a lively aquatic environment and those that keep fish away.

The project, called Amphibious Architecture, is part of the exhibition Toward the Sentient City, which opened yesterday at the Architectural League, New York.

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