Scientists Put an Ear to the Ocean Floor

By Stephen Leahy

Feb 14 (IPS) – Canada will spend 38 million dollars to install thousands of undersea listening posts along the continental shelves of North America, the Mediterranean, Gulf of Mexico and Australia.

Akin to military hydrophones used to detect the underwater passage of submarines, the receivers of the new Ocean Tracking Network will track movements of fish and marine mammals tagged with tiny acoustic transmitters.

And this too is a security issue — fish stock security.

“This will have an enormous impact on our ability to manage fisheries,” said Eliot Phillipson, president and CEO of the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a Canadian-government-sponsored research funding agency.

The Canadian donation is expected to trigger an additional 135 million dollars in funding from global partners in the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), Phillipson told IPS.

“Marine scientists have never had continuous streams of data from the ocean floor before,” said Ron O’Dor, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who leads the Ocean Tracking Network.

“Eventually up to one million fish globally will be tracked by the network,” O’Dor told IPS from Panama City, Panama. “This will change the way marine science does business.”

For full story see Scientists Put an Ear to the Ocean Floor

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