Collaborative Research: Miniature Low-Cost Vibration Tags and Computing Infrastructure for Identifying Marine Animal Sounds

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With the advent of large-scale marine passive acoustic studies it has become clear that the sources of the majority of biological sounds is not known. Knowledge of sound sources is important because sound can provide a robust measurement of biological activity, such as the distribution of spawning fishes, many of which like the cods and groupers are commercially important. It is very difficult to identify acoustic cues produced by fishes because many of them only make sounds during specific behaviors such as territoriality, aggression, courtship, and spawning and at night. Video technology has limitations in that it requires light and being in the right place at the right time. Innovative tags based on miniature accelerometers will be developed to capture sounds from marine animals. Newly recorded sounds will be deposited in the open, online infrastructure of the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, and the submission process will be streamlined to encourage similar use of this free repository. By creating computing infrastructure that enables sharing, this project will build a system that enables a self-sustaining community-driven solution to the science problem. These miniature tags will enable broader research into the motion of small structures and additional animals at minimal cost. This project will support the career of three young scientists and a postdoctoral research scientist. This project will develop and test a suite of inexpensive miniature accelerometer recorders that can be implanted or attached externally to fish, and develop an online system capable of storing data from thousands of these sensors. The three tag designs will address trade-offs between data storage, power, and tag size. The data storage tag will use a microSD card to store raw data. The acoustic transmission tag will transmit raw accelerometer data on an ultrasonic frequency that is received and decoded by a passive acoustic recorder. The micro-tag will be the smallest, lowest power tag, that will have triggered recordings to save likely signals. The data storage and micro-tags will have a mechanism for external attachment and releasing the tag, which will float to the surface for recovery. The project will produce inexpensive acceleration tags and computing infrastructure to advance knowledge of underwater sound sources.