Underwater noise levels and movement of marine mammals are being tracked in European waters by a scientific team led by Dr Joanne O’Brien and a team from the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Galway.
The devices were deployed in Turkey and Spain in recent days by ATU’s Dr María Pérez Tadeo and Yaiza Pozo Galván.
The research project, which is part of the EU “Strategic Infrastructure for Improved Animal Tracking in European Seas” (STRAITS) initiative, will study the movement of sea animals at four strategic locations.
The aim is to “better understand their biology and ecology, and aid in conservation and management”, the team says.
The acoustic listening device ready for deployment
The four locations are:
- the Danish Straits, between the Kattegat Sea and the Baltic Sea;
- the North Channel in the Celtic Sea;
- the Straits of Gibraltar, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea;
- the Straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.
Areas the equipment is being deployed around the European Straits/major swim ways Image by Dr Kim Birnie-Gauvin
Led by the Loughs Agency in Northern Ireland, the four-year €3.5m project is funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme, and the team is drawn from ten world-leading organisations.
ATU’s focus will be specifically on the movement of marine mammals. Dr María Pérez Tadeo, postdoctoral researcher at ATU’s marine and freshwater research centre, travelled to the Straits of Dardanelles last week.
Dardanelles Strait, Turkey
Pérez Tadeo was accompanied by ATU Erasum intern Yaiza Pozo Galván and they set up the equipment and co-ordinated the deployment of the first passive acoustic monitoring devices for the STRAITS project.
The research visit to Turkey was funded by the Marine Institute.
“We brought the equipment to Turkey to set it up and it was then deployed in the Straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles by Dr Aytaç Özgül, Dr Atlan Lok and Dr Evrim Kurtay, researchers from Ege University, who dived to attach it to their moorings,”they said.
“ There was a heavy storm over here not long after the dive so we were extremely lucky getting the equipment in the water beforehand, since the weather window was very brief. Equipment was also shipped to Spain and was deployed last Wednesday in the Strait of Gibraltar by Dr Ricardo F Sánchez Leal and his team, researchers from the Spanish Oceanographic Institute,” they said.
“The study of animal movements offers one of the best ways to monitor animals from regional to continental or even global scales, and from minutes to decades,” the ATU team says.
“Although animal tracking is not new, it is only recently that the technology has enabled the tracking of animals over larger areas and longer timescales,”it says.
ATU marine scientist María Pérez Tadeo and Yaiza Pozo Galván setting up the acoustic equipment onshore before its deployment
“ This advancement has yielded key information about the biology and ecology of these animals, but much more knowledge could be gained if efforts to tag and detect animals were performed collaboratively, as part of a network. This is one of the primary goals of STRAITS,”it explains.
