Friday, May 27, 2011

SPOT Tags - Good News!

From the SeaTurtle (?) website - click for detail

Looks like whilst I rant, others do.
I did propose a tethered SPOT tag and it turns out that Neil has been already deploying them for several months! To my defense, I must say that the guy is amazingly prolific and hard to keep track of!
Anyway, he has very graciously sent me the link to the following video where you can see the towed tag already in the preview image. From what I can discern, it looks like the ungainly tow arrays that were originally being deployed on Whale Sharks and the like have been miniaturized, see the picture on top, and that they can thus be deployed on those smaller species like Tigers and hopefully, GWs - and, I see no bolts!

RJD & Summit Series in the Bahamas from R.J. Dunlap Marine Conservation on Vimeo.

The video covers this event.
A lot of very prominent and very smart people have congregated and brainstormed about solutions to the many problems affecting the health of marine ecosystems. I don't know the ins and outs of it but it appears that one of the activities was Shark Tag You're it! where participants were asked to submit ideas in order to qualify for joining Neil on a Shark tagging expedition for the R.J. Dunlap Marine Conservation Program - or something like that, as I said the guy is just too prolific!
And very possibly, too avant-garde-ish as well! :)

The Shark's name is Dominic.
Looks like he is happily pinging away whilst playing the usual hit-and-run games, as witnessed by this interactive track that is part of the Program's virtual expedition.

Anyway, stellar out-of-the box stuff!
Kudos!

PS nice overview of electronic tags here. - inclusive of the model that talks to other Sharks but exclusive of the ubiquitous humble acoustic tag!

1 comment:

Colin Munro said...

Really interesting stuff. Looks like it would be perfect for basking sharks in my neck of the woods.