In our last post, we briefly explored what Jonah’s current analytical capacity of 100k samples a year could accomplish if directed exclusively to aquatic biodiversity surveys. A follow-up question is whether it is feasible to collect 100k samples.
Quick answer: it is.
If we use the continental US coastline as an example (ignore Alaska and Hawaii for now), there are approximately 12,000 miles of coastline to sample (Pacific, Gulf, Atlantic). 100,000 samples would mean roughly one sample every ~0.12 miles or 600-700 feet. That sounds dense — but not implausible.
If operations were divided regionally — one vessel on the Pacific, one in the Gulf of Mexico, one on the Atlantic — each boat would need to collect ~300–400 samples per day over a 100-day campaign.
With a trained crew, streamlined filtration, and standardized metadata capture, that’s operationally demanding but feasible.
And we don’t even need to imagine a boat physically stopping every few hundred feet.
Aerial drones can carry a 1-liter water sample (~1 kg) without exotic hardware. A vessel becomes a mobile processing hub while drones fly short transects, collect water, and return for immediate filtration and preservation. The boat keeps moving. Samples keep coming in. Boats stop at ports and ship off batches of samples.
Field operations across three vessels for 100 days might cost ~$2M. So for roughly $12M, we could generate a near-continuous aquatic biodiversity baseline for the entire continental coastline.
Not that implausible.
100k river and stream samples isn’t that daunting either. That could be crowdsourced pretty simply, especially if you start with the fact that there are 100k K-12 public schools in the US. What seemed like a logistical hurdle now becomes an educational opportunity. Same logic applies to lakes.
This simple exercise just shows that broad-scale biodiversity surveys for the US are not technically impossible. We can collect 100k samples. We can process 100k samples. Imagination and willpower are the biggest bottlenecks here.