Photo: NOAA, Permit #14682
Researchers gained important new insights into the humpback whale population(s) migrating to the Hawaiian archipelago. Equipped with acoustic sensors, Wave Glider Europa traveled over 2,600 nautical miles on a 67-day mission to record the presence of humpback whales in the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
Photo: Nicolas Winkler Photography, courtesy of the Ocean Tracking Network
For the past 10 years, the Ocean Tracking Network has used Wave Gliders to support its global aquatic animal tracking efforts. Snow crabs and more than 300 other commercially important and endangered species are being tagged with acoustic sensors to inform resource conservation and management. Wave Gliders are used to offload data from acoustic receiver arrays consisting of 250 stations moored to the ocean floor.
Today, most commercial fish stocks assessments are expensive and infrequent. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) worked with South Africa’s Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) to demonstrate a different approach—at a fraction of the cost of ships.
Photo: OTN
Snow crabs play an important role in Nova Scotia’s ecosystems. But traditional tagging methods for these mobile undersea animals relied on static receivers on the ocean floor, and weren’t always effective. The Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) needed a better way to track individually tagged crabs and understand their movements and patterns, even when they were not moving past a receiver line.