The energetics of swimming and flight in squid

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Advances in marine biology are driven by transformative technologies that alter the way things are done. My Dalhousie group created and perfected radio-acoustic positioning telemetry (RAPT) to do 'field physiology' on small scales (>100 g animal, <1 m resolution, 1 km range) based on triangulation. Now we have discovered that they actually fly! We also used popup satellite archival tags (PSAT) to record physiological, physical and positional data from solar navigation from large predators (>10 kg, 10km, 10,000 km). The 'next thing' is 'acoustic lines' for the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN). The Census of Marine Life project Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) array (>10 g, 1km, 1000 km) can track anything from salmon smolts to blue whales. We can now add VEMCO Positioning Systems (VPS)* to POST technologies to understand the physiological energetics and large-scale migrations of squids on Canada's coasts. 'Live fast, die young' squids are replacing long-lived fishes in many ecosystems and commercial fisheries globally, as fish stocks collapse ("fishing down the food web"). Understanding the energetics and life-histories of these cephalopods that are expanding their ranges is crucial to stabilizing and/or restoring these ecosystems. This proposal builds on parallel OTN efforts to extend the Canadian technology of the POST array to Canada's three oceans, studying additional squids in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific. These squids are in the middle of many food chains, and have a key role in transferring energy from small crustaceans, molluscs and fish to larger fish, marine mammals and birds. Our approaches have been to start with physiological energetics (food conversion efficiency, metabolism, growth and reproduction) and scale up to ecosystems. It is now possible to measure survival, growth, migration and population dynamics in situ with these new technologies, allowing direct tests of models and improving them for predictive capacity anticipating climate change to serve both Canadian fisheries and conservation.