Tag-A-Giant Nova Scotia 2015: First Bite

It’s 6am and the floodlights cast their rays on the back deck of the f/v Bay Queen IV in Murphy’s Pond, Port Hood’s small commercial fishing port on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.  Captain Dennis Cameron and mate Lloyd MacInnes move around the deck coiling lines and crimping monofilament, bantering over the low rumble of the inboard.

Murphy's Pond in Port Hood, Nova Scotia 
photo credit: R. Schallert

We approach the dock in our minivan loaded with crates of scientific gear and snacks for our day on the water. Dr. Steve Wilson and Robbie Schallert of Stanford University and the Tag-A-Giant Foundation lift a heavy silver crate and shuffle towards the Bay Queen IV, greeting the crews of the various vessels staging their gear in the grey light.  The crate is full of acoustic and satellite tags that, with luck, will be deployed on some of the largest tunas in the world.

The TAG team has been coming up to Nova Scotia every fall for the past 8 years and it shows.  Robbie cracks jokes with Melvin, Troy, Carl and more as we make our way down the floating dock. TAG has fostered lifelong relationships within the Port Hood community to create a collaborative environment; we couldn’t tag without their ocean expertise, and our research contributes to the sustainable management of their local bluefin fishery.

Loading the bait well with mackerel in the morning light
photo credit: E. Estess 

We shove off as the clouds turn a light pink hue. The first order of business, as with all fishing, is bait.  Dennis eyes the echo sounder and quickly shifts out of gear when he spots a school of mackerel.  We keep the biggest mackerel in the live-well and motor off towards the tuna grounds.  Once we’re in the zone Lloyd rigs up two of the thick rods with live mackerel and pink balloons as surface floats, and the third rod is connected to a kite line to dangle a live mackerel at the surface.  And now we wait.

Radio calls come in from across the Gulf of St. Lawrence.  “Congratulations Bill, glad to hear you got your fish.”  “We’re marking lots of fish over here boys.”  Again, I take note of the friendly, collaborative nature of the fishery. Canadians really are as nice as people say!  After hours of silence we decide to pick up our lines and try another spot. More silence and no tuna marks on the echo sounder.

Searching the Gulf of St. Lawrence for giant bluefin
photo credit: R. Schallert

This is our second day on the water and the fishing has been silent.  Not to mention the weather has been on the rough side of the spectrum.  Part of me accepts that this is the nature of fishing- the bite is always hotter the week before. It’s fishing, not catching. Am I wearing my lucky tuna belt? I didn’t even bring any bananas on board.  These old catchphrases and superstitions drift through my mind as the hours flow on.

Deep down I know I’m paying a karmic penance after my last trip up to Port Hood in 2013, when we tagged up to 9 giant bluefin in a day and fished for 5 days straight in sunny, flat calm conditions.  I knew I was going to have to pay some dues, and bouncing around in the cabin with my hands shoved deep into my foul weather jacket to keep warm in the Arctic breeze, I accepted my fate with a meditative mantra, “It’s fishing, not tagging.”

Wind on the water. Waiting for action.
photo credit: E. Estess

At that moment, I watched the monofilament pull tight and the pink balloon float disappear. SNAP! The rubber band holding the Teflon leader guard broke and it rocketed down the line to protect the mono leader from the glass-sharp teeth of the giant tuna below.  BZZZZZZZZZZZ the line screamed off the reel as Lloyd rocketed across the deck and started cranking away.  Dennis began maneuvering the vessel, backing down on the fish to gain slack in the 300lb test line like a boxer circling their opponent in the ring.  The rod bent with strain as the fish made a run and Lloyd waited patiently for his chance to gain line.

  

But as quickly as it had come, the tuna jerked the hook from its mouth and was gone.  Lloyd silently reeled in the slack line, pausing to look at the bent hook.  Strike one, but after days of no action the reminder of the power of these animals was enough inspiration.  The fish are around. They’re always on the move throughout the gulf waters as they hunt for herring and mackerel, and it takes skill and decent dose of luck to line up on them.  Weather permitting, we will be putting in our time these next weeks to tag and release these beautiful giants, unlocking the secrets of their life history and migratory routes to inform the sustainable management of the tuna fishery.

Hoping for an evening bite.
photo credit: E. Estess

Bluefin Satellite Tag Hunt

Low Fog kisses the Highlands along the Cabot Trail

Place yourself for a moment in the office of a tuna tagging scientist staring at a map with a GPS location of a popped-off mini-PAT satellite tag.  The tag had been attached to a Giant Bluefin Tuna for the past 10 months, and it contains a virtual diary of its movements, behaviours and environments encountered.  The tag is sending a summary of the tuna’s story to a satellite which relays it to your computer.  This summary data is like reading the first and final chapter of a novel and the story line on the back cover.  It’s valuable and you get the highlights and main point of it all, but you feel cheated somehow, especially after you spent weeks travelling and fishing to tag the tuna in the first place. If you can get the tag back, you can download the entire "story".

A lot of tags pop off far from shore, well beyond reach of an inshore vessel’s range.  So what happens when a tag comes to the surface 15 kms from shore?  And 25 kms from the nearest port where you know a local fisher who has a boat at the dock?  You scramble; you email, call and coordinate a recovery as fast as humanly possible…and then you pray, for good weather, calm seas and good visibility.  On Wednesday, this week, such an event happened.  Although I wasn’t the scientist staring at the map of the first GPS location, early Thursday morning...I was the scientist along with a Honours student from Acadia University rushing to the dock to jump on board the ‘Mary Heather’ captained by TAG-A-GIANT’s Captain Lloyd MacInnes based out of Little River, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

The search for the tag begins

Finding a tag the size of an egg with a thin black antenna sticking out would be an ok Easter-egg-hunt on land. However, throw in waves, a large area, a GPS location that is hours old, and the fact that the tag is floating with only the antenna peaking out, all of a sudden the easter egg hunt isn't quite as easy. That’s where Seth Newall, a Honours student from Acadia University comes in.  He brought a "tag locator" with him, which picks up the specific frequency of the tag and allows us to home in on the signal.  It’s a lot like playing ‘hot-cold’ as a kid, except you’re still looking for a black, half-submerged tag within 300 to 50 m of the boat.  So with Captain Lloyd at the helm spinning circles and squiggles on his chart display, Seth relaying signal strength of the tag, and myself standing on the cabin roof searching the water, we played that very game.  It was bit foggy, but relatively calm, no breaking waves or chop.  With help texts coming from TAG-A-GIANT’s Robbie Schallert in Texas, we honed our rookie skills using the tag locator.  Seth’s signal strength got stronger as the search continued.  After 3 hours of playing hide-and-seek, I spotted the black egg with antenna sticking straight up, 20 m off the port bow.

“I got it!” I yelled out, “10 o’clock! 60 feet off the port side!”

“I see it!” confirmed Captain Lloyd.

“Seth, grab the dip net while I keep an eye on it!” I instructed.

Captain Lloyd had the boat alongside the tag within seconds.  He wasn’t waiting for a dip net.  He had a deck-brush in hand and was frantically sweeping the tag closer to the boat.  Seth netted our find and with that, we had in hand the day-to-day story of one Bluefin.

Relieved Capt. with the tag

Close up of the Wildlife Computers miniPAT

Steaming back to port, the sun broke through the fog to illuminate the sea’s surface and rocky cliffs onshore, yet the lush green mountain tops of Cape Breton’s Highlands remained covered.  A pod of white-sided dolphins broke the surface and a puffin dove under upon the Mary Heather’s approach.  Some gifts in view while others remained out of sight, a fitting summary to our search’s conclusion.

Acadia Team with the tag safely secured!!

-          Written by Aaron Spares, Acadia University Coastal Ecology Lab 

Chagos 3.0 - Day 10: Last-Minute Mantas

After 10 busy days we are reluctantly leaving Chagos, heading to Blenheim Reef and Speaker’s Bank in the north-west on our way out of the archipelago. It’s an early start for our last day. At 4:30am I’m filling tanks, and we already have one of our final round of receiver deployments out of the way before the sun rises. Chagos treats us to one last spectacular sunrise: an orange ball floats above Ile de Passe at Salomon Atoll as we drift at the lagoon entrance while our dive team deploy the temperature and dissolved oxygen loggers used to monitor water conditions around our acoustic receiver network.

As we prepare to leave Salomon we have one last surprise. Manta rays are feeding at the surface around the boat, and eagle-eyed captain guides the tender into position allowing us to get one last satellite tag attached. Every piece of data counts, and this tag will be a valuable addition to the information this expedition can provide.

This has been a fantastic trip, and yet again the teamwork between our group of six scientists (and diving doctor) and the ship’s crew has been the key to its success. The Chagos acoustic array now comprises 63 acoustic receivers, and we have tagged over 160 animals since the project’s start in 2013. Our two VR4 Globals have been successfully repaired and we have two of last year’s sharks already ‘talking’ to us as they swim by.



As we leave Speaker’s Bank, we say goodbye to Chagos for another year.

Chagos 3.0 - Day 9: Chagos Goes Global

Deploying the latest technology in the field can be fraught with difficulties, and our Vemco VR4 Global receivers are certainly high tech. Not only do they detect and record shark movements, but they are equipped with an Iridium satellite antenna, mounted on a surface buoy, that sends information about detections straight back to us in real time, allowing us to monitor our sharks from anywhere in the world.

A Vemco VR4 Global buoy floats at the surface, uplinking
to Iridium satellites through the dome at the top.

Ensuring that each step in the chain, from detection to sending the signal to the surface unit to transmitting the signal to the satellite, is working perfectly requires patience and a lot of testing – after all it will be twelve months before we have a chance to service this equipment again.

Dr Taylor Chapple is our team’s expert on working with the ‘Globals’, and he has had a busy couple of days. Despite having no apparent issues with replacing batteries, cleaning, and reinstalling both our units earlier in the expedition, we had been getting no data sent through, despite everything apparently working perfectly. Taylor, supported remotely by the Vemco team, worked to eliminate all the possible causes by testing each link in the chain. He concluded that it might be the hydrophone – the listening tip of the system – or its connection that was causing the problems.

With spare hydrophones carefully swaddled in bubble-wrap we set out to our the first of our Global receivers again, this time with a battery of additional testing equipment. Two divers detached the hydrophone from the mooring cable and passed it up to Taylor, who carefully changed the hydrophone and checked the connections, before placing it back in the water with some test transmitters. Connecting wirelessly to the surface part of the system, he is able to see what the system sees, and he was quickly able to confirm that it was now detecting the tags. Hot on the heels of this a radio call from Robbie Schallert, back on board the ship, confirmed that the system was also sending the data back to Vemco. We were back on line! Carefully reattaching the hydrophone back to its anchor, the system was ready to go for another year of work in Chagos.

Dealing with problems like this in the field requires patience and resourcefulness, and the support of a good team at home as well!

Chagos 3.0 - Day 7: Chasing Giants

Today finds us at the Egmont Islands, off the south west corner of the Great Chagos Bank. We've come here looking for manta rays, which we know from previous visits to be a common sight around the reefs and within the lagoon. The purpose of our visit here is to acoustically tag some of the manta population and deploy some of our acoustic receivers to track their movements over the coming year. The aim is to understand how resident the mantas of Egmont are, and the influence of the tides and other natural cycles on their daily movements around this small atoll.

Firstly, however, you need to find a manta, and this year we have a new tool at our disposal – a Phantom camera drone. Able to relay live images from a bird eye view to the pilot on the deck of the boat, we can locate groups of mantas and direct the tagging team to the area.

The Phantom camera drone is on the lookout!

Tagging mantas is a somewhat different exercise to the work with sharks – rather than fishing for them (it is too hard to get plankton on a hook) we have to search for mantas feeding near the surface and then apply the tags directly, either from the boat or by free-diving alongside them. A calm approach is needed, both to avoid spooking the animals and sending them to deeper water.

The day proved to be rich in mantas, with 12 tags going out and then a reef dive in the afternoon encountering at least eight more feeding at depth along the entrance to the lagoon. The shark work continued in between manta sorties, and we acoustically tagged a further 11 animals, including our largest reef shark of the trip so far – an impressive male silvertip measuring almost two metres. With three days left here we are making good progress.

Taylor attempts to tag a manta

Aside from the science workload, our most senior scientist and the trip’s doctor have been moonlighting in the galley, producing excellent desserts to complement the already abundant meals aboard. Hopefully all the hard work on deck will keep waistlines in check!

   -Dave Tickler

Chagos 3.0 - Day 6: Corals Spawn and Constellations

Doing fieldwork in remote areas has its challenges but also its many rewards, and one of these is being in the right place at the right time for some of nature’s most amazing shows.

Coral spawn floats to the surface

We’re anchored on the northern bank of the Great Chagos Bank, catching and tagging sharks as part of an ongoing collaboration between Stanford University, the University of Western Australia and the Bertarelli Foundation. The tagging going on into the night as sharks are active after dark when planktonic food rises to the surface and a multitude of fishes feed. While tending the line we have had a real treat today as endless drifts of coral spawn, released to coincide with the total darkness of a new moon, swirl past the boat. Corals synchronise their spawning to overcome the armies of predators for which these events are a feeding bonanza, so the water is filled with millions of floating eggs that mirror the Milky Way in the sky above as they pass the underwater lights. It’s a rare treat to be in just the right place to see this happen, particularly in the midst of flat calm seas and clear skies, and for most of us it is the first time we have witnessed this spectacle. We scoop a sample of the planktonic soup into a container for inspection under a magnifying lense, which reveals a mass of spherical eggs, together with myriad small crustaceans and other free floating ocean dwellers.

Peering at the plankton

Every day in the field has these moments, whether it is rescuing a Wilson’s Storm Petrel that has become stranded on deck, or seeing one of the sky filling sunsets that have been a regular feature of this trip, and it helps remind us of the unique opportunity we have in being able to study places like Chagos.

Aaron rescues a Wilson's storm petrel

Chagos 3,0 - Day 5

Day 5 finds us exploring the northern edge of the great Chagos Bank, terra (or rather aqua) incognita for us. With the important servicing work all but completed, we are focussing our efforts on getting almost 100 electronic tags out on sharks and manta rays, the focal species for this study.

We carry three types of tag on this trip. Our workhorses are the acoustic transmitter tags that communicate with our receiver network. We have acoustically tagged 92 sharks so far in this programme and will be adding another 75 animals to our group on this trip.

Whilst the acoustic tags can tell us about the fine scale movements of shark around our monitored reefs, satellite archival tags collect information on position, depth and temperature wherever the shark goes, and then detatch from the shark, float to the surface, and transmit the data back to the lab via a satellite. This allows us to see, amongst other things, the large scale movements and the diving behaviour of sharks which is vital to understanding how they use a large area like the Chagos Reserve.

Lastly, Dr Taylor Chapple has brought his camera tags with him again this year, and with three deployments already we are building up our shark’s eye view of Chagos.

But before we can deploy any of this technology, we must first catch a shark. This involves early starts and late finishes to take advantage of the fact that predators are often more active at dawn and dusk, and so our chances of an encounter are improved. We use barbless circle hooks that minimise the chance of the shark swallowing the hook, and make for simple removal of the hook after tagging. Baited with fish, the hooks are streamed off the back of the boat and tended by one of the team at all times so that as soon as a shark takes the bait we can bring it on board and tag. It’s all about ensuring the welfare of the animal, so before we lift a shark out of the water we make certain that everything is ready to making the tagging as quick a process as possible, and that the padded tagging mat and the saltwater hose to pump water over the shark’s gills are ready.

A hose is inserted in the shark's mouth to keep oxygen-rich
water flowing over its gills, while the scientists attach an
acoustic tag

Handling even a small shark has to be approached with care as they very strong for their size –both the head and tail are controlled while they are lifted, and once on the mat at least two of the team control the shark while the others operate. The Stanford team have years of tagging experience between them, and their guidance makes sure we stay safe on the swim step.

A small shark is returned to the sea

Acoustic tagging involves a quick incision in the abdominal wall through which the tag is inserted, then a suture to close it. While this is happening another scientist takes blood and biopsy samples for genetic and other tests. Lastly, a marker tag is placed just below the shark’s dorsal fin, identifying the shark as having been tagged internally so that we will know if we capture it again next year. Both the satellite and camera tags are attached externally, one with a titanium dart just below the dorsal fin and the other to the fin itself. Both are used in combination with the acoustic tags, so that multiple types of data can be collected from the movements of a single animal. This increases the amount we can learn from our sample of sharks and rays.

So far this trip we have tagged 20 sharks – with 5 days left in Chagos the pressure is high to keep up the work rate!

      -Dave Tickler

Chagos 3.0 - Day 4

Day four, and we’re racing through our servicing work with 44 of 48 sites visited already, thanks to the support of a great crew on Vava and some of the calmest weather we’ve seen in Chagos. With flat seas and hardly a breath of wind, finding our monitoring equipment is proving easy, and the boat and diving work is a true pleasure!

Most of our monitoring array here is made up of submerged VR2W type acoustic receivers, which require diving on, but with new units ready to go in the water it take a two person team only minutes to remove the cable ties and hose clamp fastening the receiver to the mooring line, and fix the replacement in its place. We would probably all rather the dives took longer as there is always something to distract us down there, whether it is schools of fusileers circling you on a reef wall, or a carpet of garden eels stretching away across the sandy bottom of one of the channels.

Vava’s bosun, James, puts the finish touches
on a newly installed VR2W receiver

The other two types of receivers used in the Chagos array require very different approaches. The latest addition to the array in 2014, the four VR4-UWM (standing for UnderWater Modem) can be ‘talked’ to directly from the boat using a portable acoustic modem that instructs the unit on the seabed to transmit its data up to the surface. By holding station over or near the receiver, we can retrieve our data without even getting our feet wet!

Dr. Taylor Chapple enjoying some time
out of the sun while he downloads
 one of the Chagos underwater modem receivers

The last type of equipment used out here are our two VR4-Globals. These, as the name suggests, give us access to our data from anywhere in the world through an Iridium uplink build into a surface unit, connected to a hydrophone hanging below. The whole thing is fitted into a buoy that can be anchored in strategic positions to give us live data on shark detections. These are by far the most complicated to service, requiring a team tackling the surface components to coordinate closely with divers working on the hydrophone and cable. Add a ripping current and it makes for a challenging job, but it’s worth the effort to get real time feedback from our tagged sharks when we are back at our desks.

Taylor gets to work on the transmitter…

…while the dive team are busy below

With the vital servicing work nearly complete we are focussing the majority of our effort on catching and tagging sharks. More on that tomorrow.
   -Dave Tickler

Chagos 3.0

The team from Stanford University and The University of Western Australia are back for a return trip to the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) to service (rebattery, download data, replace moorings and add new receivers) the acoustic array, as well as tag sharks with various electronic tags, including CATS camera tags, Wildlife Computer MiniPATs and SPOT tags, Lotek pop-ups, and Vemco acoustic tags.

   -Robbie Schallert

Dr. Aaron Carlisle tapes up a
Vemco acoustic receiver

Dr. Jon Dale gets the shark line ready