AGILE OCEAN OBSERVATION SYSTEMS FOR AQUACULTURE

Understanding variations in ocean conditions and how they relate to feeding patterns, mortality rate, and overall health of the fish population in aquaculture pens. Traditional ocean instrumentation is often expensive, difficult to deploy and operate, and lack real-time data transmission. As a result, long-dwell and real-time multi-sensor ocean observation systems are not yet widely deployed across the industry, which hampers our ability to adequately respond to ocean environmental events (e.g. algae blooms) and limits our understanding of how the ocean environment affects fish feeding patterns and health.

Here we present the development and deployment of an agile sensor system based on the Sofar Spotter buoy (Fig. 1) at aquaculture sites in Baja California (Mexico), Nova Scotia (Canada), and Helgeland (Norway). The solar-powered surface buoy is two-way connected through the Iridium satellite network to a web-based dashboard and API (Fig. 1). The dashboard allows the user to see live data, change settings on the device, and access features such as geofence and system health. The buoy is designed for plug-and-play simplicity, allowing for easy use, and simple integration with existing and future environmental sensors.

We will present the deployment of a number of buoys, each with strings of 20 temperature sensors to resolve the vertical variability of water temperature, along with collocated, wave, wind, and temperature data.  We will present data from each of the sites and discuss how the temperature variations and stratification dynamics may affect fish behavior and feeding patterns. This work will be a first demonstration of how easy-to-use ocean observing systems, combined with user-friendly data transmission and access, enable remote-monitoring of ocean data for investigating fish behavior and survivability.