Ecologists have had a difficult time tracking down fish and marine life, according to Time. Tracking living, moving creatures in the vast waters of the world isn’t as easy as locating land-dwelling species. The ocean is still full of mystery and scientists have been trying to follow the whereabouts of fish for more than 100 years.
Salmon are particularly mysterious when it comes to location, and scientists have relied on capturing the fish and releasing them back into the water adorned with transponders to track their mobility. The devices work, but receivers must be placed in fixed spots in order to read the transponders and, well, scientists kind of had to make an educated guess where the salmon may be swimming. Not knowing if they hit the spot, it’s nearly impossible for scientists to study why, for example, the salmon population has severely decreased since 2002.
So what did National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ecologist Sean Hayes decide would help this situation? Enlisting a man on the inside –– the elephant seal.
The seals tend to hang out where the salmon do, both enjoying the same kind of environment and following similar traffic patterns. The NOAA team will glue a transponder to the seals record track their locations. Where the seals go, most likely the salmon do too.
“Elephant seals cover so much ground over the North Pacific,” Hayes said in Time. “They get out into the open ocean habitat where we just don’t have receivers.”
The plan also works out nicely financially, as well. “The cost of deploying the tags on an elephant seal for a year is the equivalent of what it costs us to go out and track a fish for a day in a ship,” Hayes added.
Though the plan is just in it’s testing phase, if it works, it could prove extremely beneficial to the plummeting fishing industry, which was hurt very much my the decrease in the salmon population. If scientists can figure out where the salmon hang out while in the depths of the ocean, they can try to determine what is causing the problem.
“If we have information on the habitats of fish species going through severe depletion, we can better set quotas,” says Sara Iverson, scientific director of the Ocean Tracking Network, a Canadian research firm. “We can stay out of the way in areas where they’re spawning and change the ways in which we use the ocean.”
Photo by mikebaird via Flickr.