Newswise — A Wave Glider unmanned maritime vehicle deployed by the Ocean Tracking Network in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to test mobile collection and remote offloading of marine animal tracking information ends its test mission on August 22, 2012.
Deployed from Stephenville, N.L., the Wave Glider travelled within the Gulf of St. Lawrence to pick up detections of acoustically tagged salmon along their migration route through the Strait of Belle Isle. Originally scheduled to finish its journey mid-July in Cape Breton, researchers took advantage of good weather and programmed the glider to continue testing on the eastern side of Sable Island in an effort to track grey seals in the area.
The Wave Glider, built by U.S.-based company Liquid Robotics, harvests energy from wave motion and solar panels to generate thrust at the ocean's surface. Piloted by the Liquid Robotics team, the glider carries an acoustic receiver, manufactured by Canadian company VEMCO, to collect detections of tagged marine animals within 800 metres.
Mobile receivers greatly expand the range of animal detections contributing to more comprehensive records of animal movement, migration and survival. In the future, gliders will be able to upload data from fixed receiver stations eliminating the need to hire ships for data retrieval by OTN researchers. This mission tested the ability of a mobile receiver platform and did not collect data from bottom moored receivers.
“These things have excellent station keep capabilities. You can take a Wave Glider and literally park it over a [receiver]. On this mission it’ll be moving all the time, but if we want to use it in the future to upload receivers you would just tell it, ‘go here,’ and it would stay there for however long it takes to upload the data. If there’s a problem and it takes two or three days to upload the data, the glider doesn’t care. The whole time it’s uploading [data], it can be sending it to you via satellite. When it’s done with that one, it just moves on to the next one.” – Richard Davis, Technical Director for the Dalhousie Glider Group
Researchers are also collecting ocean surface parameters as a context for animal movement and migration.
“The scientific community has little oceanographic data available in general for the location of the mission at this time of year for use in developing models of the oceanography and currents in the Gulf. The models are important for weather prediction, search and rescue activities, understanding the drivers of the ecosystem, and for environmental responses to events like oil spills.” – Dr. Fred Whoriskey, Executive Director, OTN
After a successful test mission, OTN plans to purchase a Wave Glider in 2013.
OTN is a $168-million research and technology development project headquartered at Dalhousie University. Starting in 2008, OTN began deploying Canadian state of the art acoustic receivers and oceanographic monitoring equipment in key ocean locations. These are being used to document the movements and survival of marine animals carrying acoustic tags and to document how both are influenced by oceanographic conditions. OTN is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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