16-Aug-2012
New high-tech ocean observers debut above ‘The Blue Serengeti’; ‘Shark Net’ app lets public follow tagged animals in real time
Monterey Bay, CA, August 16, 2012—A sleek, unmanned Wave Glider robot has been deployed off the US coast near San Francisco — the latest addition to an arsenal of ocean observing technologies revealing in real time the mysterious travels of great white sharks and other magnificent marine creatures.
The self-propelled wave and solar-powered glider is part of a new network of data receivers on fixed buoys that will pick up signals from acoustic tags on animals passing within 1,000 feet and transmit the data to a research team on shore, led by Stanford University Marine Sciences Prof. Barbara Block.
The long-lasting, relatively inexpensive acoustic tags and the local array of both fixed and mobile ocean transmitters will fine tune 12 years of insights gleaned from satellite-connected tags used to follow thousands of animals throughout their entire Pacific journeys.
Dr. Block and her team are on a mission to create a “wired ocean” where live feeds of predator movements are relayed by a series of “ocean WiFi hotspots” on moored buoys and self-propelled Wave Gliders carrying acoustic receivers.
The technology is central to Dr. Block’s “Blue Serengeti Initiative,” which builds on the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project, part of the international Census of Marine Life (2000-2010).
News release in full: click here
Sample coverage: by The Scientist, click here; by Reuters, click here; by TIME, click here. YouTube video of the Wave Glider launch, click here
Coverage summary, click here
]]>22 June 2011
Decade of electronic tagging, tracking of 23 top Pacific Ocean predators reveals remarkable homing by marine animals, well-defined highways
Like the vast African plains, two huge expanses of the North Pacific Ocean are major corridors of life, attracting an array of marine predators in predictable seasonal patterns, according to final results from the Census of Marine Life Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project published today in the journal Nature.
The paper culminates the TOPP program’s decade-long effort to track top marine predator movements in the Pacific Ocean. It presents for the first time the results for all 23 tagged species and reveals how migrations and habitat preferences overlap — a remarkable picture of critical marine life pathways and habitats.
The study found that major hot spots for large marine predators are the California Current, which flows south along the US west coast, and a trans-oceanic migration highway called the North Pacific Transition Zone, which connects the western and eastern Pacific on the boundary between cold sub-arctic water and warmer subtropical water — about halfway between Hawaii and Alaska.
“These are the oceanic areas where food is most abundant, and it’s driven by high primary productivity at the base of the food chain — these areas are the savanna grasslands of the sea,” say co-authors and project originators Barbara Block of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and Daniel Costa, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“Knowing where and when species overlap is valuable information for efforts to manage and protect critical species and ecosystems.”
Full news release: click here
Coverage summary: click here
Example coverage, by Washington Post: click here; more sources, click here
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