So in my wandering Out & About lately, I seem to be on a bit of a fish and marine theme.
It's awfully hard to understand the seas. They cover our planet, they feed us, they create commerce ... but our unaided human form can't enter their depths or understand their dynamics. Sadly, we can jump on the back of giant tuna and swim with it only in fiction and dream. We can hold tight to a sea turtle and fly through the depths with it only in our imagination.
It's nice to have mysteries, I suppose, but not if we are trying to manage the mysteries as a commercial resource or protect them from dying off and disappearing from our planet. In the past decade, the simple concept of a tracking device has become an effective tool for relaying data about creatures that go places we can't - and turning out previously held notions upside down.
I had the opportunity to visit the National Marine Life Center in Buzzards Bay recently. This is a place where injured sea turtles, including the endangered Kemp's Ridley species recover before being re-released in the sea.
Released turtles wear tracking devices that transit their whereabouts back as long as the device's battery lasts. Us humans used to make a lot of assumptions about the movement of the turtles and, in fact, past release policies dropped them into the Florida waters. Now that we're able to let a tracking device go where no man can go, it seems that these younger turtle don't actually swim all the way to Florida. They loop down to about the Carolinas and then back north. The current theory is that as they grow older, they may make larger migrations, but they seem to build up to it.
On the other hand, it turns out that tuna travel a lot more than anyone thought. Tuna are Big Fish. And Big Fish are a Big Deal that drive a segment of our economy. And they've been disappearing.
John Chisholm, a biologist with the Mass Division of Marine Fisheries Shark Research project, was one of our guests at the last First Friday. He's also involved in a tuna research project, in which tuna are tagged with sophisticate satellite tracking devices and monitored for year or more.
It turns out tuna are truly global citizens. They don't just stick to the eastern seaboard. Nope, they vacation across the Atlantic in the Mediterranean. They cruise down to Mexico and the Caribbean. The only constant is that their world journeys last a year almost to the day and if you know where the fish was in Cape Cod Bay you can almost bet on finding it in the precise location a year hence.
Unless, of course, it ends up in a fish pen in Europe.
And here's where the intersection of technology and policy gets really interesting. Because the oceans are a bounty for much of the world, different countries set policies on what can be caught how. Through increased understanding, it is quickly becoming clear that the US fisheries industry doesn't exist in a vacuum, that what we decide impacts other areas of the globe. And what they decide impacts us. We now have proof that "our" fish are also "their" fish. And how that technology-enhanced understanding leads to better global ocean management and industry development is another whole level of discussion.
And lest you think that only Big matters, drop in on the National Marine Fisheries COPEPOD project at http://www.st.nmfs.gov/plankton/. This plankton database tracks and seeks to understand the tiniest of marine life, which forms the base of the sea's food pyramid. In my wildest dreams I don't think I'd ever envisioned a website devoted to the study of plankton, but it turns out to be a really interesting story. And reminds me that technology doesn't just play a role in the better gathering of knowledge, but also in the critical process of sharing that knowledge and teaching people about the world around us.
Last week I also got to see another technology tool for fisheries and ocean understanding. A giant one. Mass Maritime Academy hosted the new NOAA research ship, the Henry B. Bigelow. This is one cool vessel.
It's named after the human Henry B. Bigelow, whose equally human granddaughter was sitting in front of me. He was a pioneering ocean researcher, credited with setting the foundation for modern oceanography and who was a proponent of the importance of interrelationship between biology, chemistry, and physical science in ocean study. His 1929 report to the National Academy of Sciences led to establishment of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1930 and he was also WHOI's founding director.
Like its namesake, the ship's mission is to be a scientific platform for understanding the ocean. It will work primary from Maine to North Carolina and is designed for 40-day "endurance" - that is, it can be at sea for 40 consecutive days. It's research tools enable the interdisciplinary approach of its namesake, as well.
The most amazing thing about this ship is how quiet it is. This isn't just a matter of ear comfort - when a boat is underway, the underwater sounds it creates disturbs ocean life. This can skew research. But equally important, underwater noise pollution is a very real issue.
State of the art technology in hull design created a container that will change that equation. The boat, you see, is not only a carrier of technology for research - it, itself, is product of evolving technology that creates safer, more effective vessels.
It is all intertwined. The plankton and the tuna, and the chemistry and the biology, and in our hands, the technology as a tool for understanding, sharing understanding, and applying solutions based on that understanding of our underwater world. And the fish swim on.
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