Advances in Tagging and Marking Technologies for Fisheries Management and Research

Session Topic Descriptions

Session: Satellite Tagging

Chair: Malcolm Francis
Keynote: Barbara Block

Satellite-transmitting tags have revolutionised the way we gather information on the behaviour and migrations of large marine organisms. The technology negates the need to recapture the animal to retrieve the tagging data. The two main forms of satellite tags are pop-up archival tags, which store data on board, and position-only tags which are geo-located by a satellite when their aerial breaks the surface of the water. Tag technology, the uses of the data, and the target animals are diversifying rapidly.

This session will focus on developments in areas such as tag technology (e.g. new sensors that record different types of information, increased data storage and transmission capability, miniaturisation), new tricks with old data (especially improvements in geolocation algorithms, and ways of extracting the most from precious data), integrating different types of tags to simultaneously address large- and small-scale movement questions, and discoveries about the migrations and behaviour of animals which would not have been possible before the advent of this technology.

Session: Archival Tags

Chair: Andrew Seitz
Keynote: Julian Metcalfe

Archival tags are fish marking devices with onboard computers that record data measured by a variety of electronic sensors. Because the tags do not telemeter data to a receiver, archival tags freed researchers from arduously following study organisms in inhospitable places and during inopportune times. First generation archival tags were large, had limited battery life and contained the most basic sensors, such as temperature and depth. However, since these first archival tags, they have been greatly miniaturized, contain a wide variety of sensors and have greatly extended battery lives. Because of their versatility, archival tags have been applied to a wide variety of freshwater and marine organisms.

This session will focus on development of archival tag technology, the diversification of their use, novel approaches to data processing and biological/ecological discoveries gleaned from their use.

Session: Acoustic Tags and Acoustic Arrays

Chair: Mike Stokesbury
Keynote: Michelle Heupel

John Shepherd said that “fish are like trees, except they are invisible and they move”. This of course makes them very difficult to study. Therefore it is crucial that researchers use innovative procedures to answer crucial questions about the behaviour of fishes. Through the use of acoustic telemetry researchers are gaining insight into the behaviour of many fishes in the wild. Acoustic tags are electronic tags that send acoustic signals that are recorded by receivers when a tagged aquatic animal is within range. These tags are generally very small and often surgically implanted in the animal. The signals produced by the tag identify the individual tag, and may also provide some other data such as temperature or pressure. The receivers may be either active if the receiver is operated from a mobile platform, or passive if the receiver is moored at the surface, in the water column or on the substrate. Tagging of fishes with acoustic tags has provided information on movement, migration, behaviour, survival and stock structure for many fish species.

This section will focus on innovative new tagging technology, and studies that use strategic array geometry to answer important scientific questions regarding the habits, movement and mortality of fishes.

Session: Chemical and Biological Markers

Chair: Tony Fowler
Keynote: Steve Campana

This session is focussed on the use of natural markers for distinguishing between individuals or groups of fish. Through the 20th Century the classic application of such natural tags was for stock discrimination or to determine movement patterns based on differences in characteristics such as morphometrics, patterns of circuli in scales, parasite loads or allelic frequencies of gene loci. Over the past 20 years technological advances in analytical chemistry, molecular biology and biochemistry have led to development of new more sophisticated natural tags that have substantially more resolving power. These include new genetic markers that are based on nucleotide sequencing of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. These now bring a significantly higher level of discriminatory ability to genetic studies, which has substantially increased their applications to fishery and aquaculture science. Another recently developed natural tag exploits the ‘elemental fingerprint’ that is retained in the chemical structure of fish otoliths. As these structures grow inside a fish’s head they incorporate trace elements and isotopes into the crystalline structure at rates determined by the environment the fish is living in. The association between this chemical record and the age-related structure of the otoliths means that they retain a detailed chronological record of the life history of the fish that forms its elemental fingerprint. Recent developments in high-resolution, analytical instruments now provide scientists with the means of retrospectively accessing this specific life history information.

In this session a series of case studies will be presented that reveal such recent advances in biological and chemical tags, and relate their usefulness in providing important information for fishery management.

The keynote speaker is Dr Steven Campana from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Canada, who is now recognised as the leading figure in otolith science with respect to the development of new otolith-based technologies and methodological protocols. He pioneered the use of otolith chemistry as natural tags, and is largely responsible for the profound development in their use in fishery-related studies.

Session: Transponder and Non-electronic Tags

Chair: Jeremy McKenzie
Keynote: Lee Blankenship

Tagging methods covered under this session include all implantable non-electronic tags, passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags and coded wire tags (CWT). Papers on these technologies made up the majority of the 1988 Tagging Symposium published proceedings. Significant advances in plastics, polymers, implantation methods, and micro electronics have enabled these “long established” tagging technologies to remain as important today to fisheries management and aquaculture as they were in 1988. PIT tags, in their infancy in 1988, are a fraction of the cost they were in real terms today. Advances in RFID technologies, particularly in relation to tag detection and information content, have opened up new fisheries research applications. There have also been significant advances in encoding and detection methods for CWT tags.

The overarching theme for this session is: ‘new applications and advances in long-established tagging technologies’; we encourage presenters to interpret this broadly

Session: Radio Telemetry

Chair: Larry Hildebrand
Keynote: Steve Cooke

The concept of radio telemetry has been around for more than 90 years and the technology has been applied extensively to tracking animals for the past 50 years. Radio telemetry has the ability to provide spatial and temporal location data, physiological status, and activity in its natural environment with minimal disturbance to the fish. These types of tags have provided tools for the study of migration, behaviour and survival. Continued technological advances have led to substantial reductions in tag size, increases in tag life, and the addition of new sensors that have allowed the collection of more types of data and increased the already broad range of applications for this tagging technique. This session will focus on how these technological advances have increased the power of radio telemetry as a fisheries research tool, how the information collected has been used to address fisheries management objectives, innovative uses of the technology that add to our knowledge of fish behaviour and biology, and how radio telemetry can be used to assess affects of environmental and anthropogenic stressors.

Session: Integrated Approaches

Chair: Jennifer Nielsen
Keynote: Ron ODor or Mike Stokebury

Results for new tagging technologies can be integrated on many spatial and temporal scales. The use of multiple tag technologies, old or new, on the same organism in discrete geographic locations at the same time can provide view of activity or behavior which can be integrated into synthesis inference for that group of organisms. Integrating tagging information from different systems or technologies over time can also add synoptic inference. Even more exciting is the ability to integrate data derived from tags with information drawn from other scientific approaches. Combining tagging data with information on population genetics for the same groups or species in the area where the animal was tagged can enhance, corroborate, or add complexity to inference derived from tagged animals. The same is true for other scientific approached such as otolith microchemistry, micro-elemental analyses, and other physiological investigations that can provide data on systems level mechanisms when combined with tag data for individual organisms. Physical analyses of changes in environmental condition and climate, when combined with tag data, can be used to predict important processes and regimes that help quantify data derived from tags.

The goals of this session are to present integrative studies that show the importance of collaborative, cross-disciplinary efforts when planning and interpreting data derived from tags.

Session: Tagging Data in Fisheries Management

Chair: Mark Maunder
Keynote: John Sibert

Tagging has a long tradition in fisheries management and assessment. In recent times the trend has been toward integrating tagging information directly into stock assessment models and away from the estimating factors like growth, movement, exploitation and abundance as “stand-alone” parameters. As the methodologies have improved, information obtained from tagging has increased in quantity and breadth. For example, vast quantities of fine scale spatial data are now available from archival tags. As a generality, stock assessment modelling has not kept pace with the higher level of detail new tagging methods offer. As a consequence the full management potential of the new tagging data is often unrealised. For example; there needs to be conciliation between the block transfer age-structured stock assessment models and the fine scale movement data. Although some modelling advances have been made, often these have proved less useful from a management perspective than hoped.

In this session we are looking for novel approaches in the use of tagging data for stock assessment and management. Preference will be given to presentations where the author has sought to maximise the fisheries management potential of the underlying tagging data through experimental design and/or analysis.