Just imagine for a moment that you could put a tag, no more than an inch or two in size, on a salmon when it leaves its river and heads out into the ocean coming back to the same river to spawn, a year or two later, say. The tag is designed to listen for timed acoustic transmissions from stationary ocean sound sources, the arrival times indicating its distance from the sources. When the salmon is caught and the tag retrieved, one can reconstruct where the salmon went and learn about its diving patterns. The tag is, in effect, a tiny little RAFOS receiver (see my post Aug. 13, 2023). My colleague, Prof. Godi Fischer, developed such a tag and we were able to show that it works in a first test in the Gulf of Mexico (see reference below). That is the good news.
Now for the sad news. The development was structured as a doctoral thesis project in electrical engineering. In fact, 3 PhD students were involved in the project. At various stages of development, the chip design would be sent off for fabrication at a service that was very cost-effective for academic (as opposed to industrial) projects enabling the students to validate the evolving design. While the development took a long time, it resulted in a design which we tested successfully in the Gulf of Mexico. We made some final adjustments to the design, but before they could be tested and validated, the service for fabricating the chips in small quantities went out of business. There were two options open to us. One was to spend some hundred thousand dollars to buy complete wafers. We couldn’t risk that without first validating the design. The other option and more sensible approach is to port the design to a new chip technology that has a cost-effective testing service. To do so would require some months of an engineer to work with Prof. Fischer to port and test the design. The basic design remains the same, but one has to take into account the details of the smaller scales of the new chip technology. But for this to happen we need to find new funding.
What I can’t understand is why it is so difficult to marshal the interest, the drive if you will, to approach NOAA, NSF, ONR with a modest proposal to bring this project to fruition. Had this technology been available I know of people who would have been interested in using it to track cod in the Nordic Seas, flounder on Georges Bank, plaice in the North Sea, and as I mentioned, salmon in the Labrador Sea. This is what I know. See the Braun et al. reference below for a more complete and inspired discussion of the concept. Were the tag available I can imagine many other applications, and not limited to fish but more broadly to the full suite of marine life! Right now I weep for it seems like ‘for want of a nail the battle was lost’.
Rossby, T., G. Fischer, and M. Omand (2017), A new technology for continuous long-range tracking of fish and lobster. Oceanography,17(2), 30-31
Braun, C. D., G. Fischer, H. T. Rossby, H. Furey, A. Bower, and Simon R. Thorrold (2019). The RAFOS Ocean Acoustic Monitoring (ROAM) Tag: A Highly Accurate Fish Tag for At-sea Movement Studies. North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission Technical Report No. 15: 168–170, 2019