Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Wired fish reveal ocean secrets

Everybody gets a microchip and sensors track movement. Big brother? No, a vital study of how fish move.

Hundreds of years of fishing show how to catch fish. Unfortunately, that's about all we know about fish. Most fish science comes from using a crystal ball on fishing records to study the ones that got away. Is that the best we can do in the 21st century? No.
The Canadian Foundation for Innovation is buying fish scientists an Ocean Tracking Network to study fish even if they don't end up on the deck of a boat. The idea is to radiotag a million fish and monitor their movement with a worldwide network of receivers. The results will show for the first time where lots diffent kinds of fish live and how they move around.

There's more to fish than fishing, and now there's more to fish science than studying fishing.

1 comment:

Tim Adams said...

"There's more to fish than fishing, and now there's more to fish science than studying fishing"

Amen to that.

I would also add "and there's more to fisheries management than controlling fishing", but maybe that's getting a bit off-topic :-)

You've reminded me that I ought to do a piece on the radio (and conventional) tagging that we're doing on tuna in Papua New Guinea at the moment. We've got some great footage of pole-and-lining that could be YouTubed.