Issue 10, December 2009

VEMCO on the Road

139th American Fisheries Society AGM
From August 30th to September 2nd, VEMCO participated in the American Fisheries Society (AFS) Annual General Meeting held in Nashville, Tennessee as an exhibitor and workshop presenter.

Richard Vallee, VP Sales & Marketing at VEMCO, presented a workshop on VEMCO Acoustic Telemetry to a large group of national and international fish researchers and marine biologists. Highlights included a sneak peak at new and upcoming VEMCO technology as well as a Q&A session with the group.

As one of the event sponsors, VEMCO donated a VR100 Acoustic Tracking Receiver and a VH165 omni-directional hydrophone to AFS for their Silent Auction. The successful bid was submitted by Andy J. Danylchuk, Assistant Professor of Fisheries Conservation at the University of Massachusetts. Congratulations Andy!

AFS President Bill Franzin also presented VEMCO with a Certificate of Appreciation plaque in recognition of VEMCO's continuous support of AFS.

8th European Conference on Acoustic Telemetry
Jayson Semmens, Jeremy Lyle, Ed Forbes and Colin Buxton (Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute, University of Tasmania) and Dale Webber (VEMCO) recently gave a talk at the 8th European Conference on Acoustic Telemetry held in Umeå, Sweden from September 14th to 18th.

Their presentation was entitled "Examining movements and activity of banded morwong (Cheilodactylus spectabilus) during the spawning period using acoustic monitoring."

The authors described the development and implementation of VEMCO's new V9AP accelerometer acoustic transmitter along with VEMCO's VPS multi-array positioning system to study the spawning behavior of the banded morwong. The study took place on a near-shore reef on the Tasman Penninsula between January and May of 2009. The VPS array was used to derive three dimensional positions of morwong movements on the reef coupled with measurements of spawning activity using the V9AP.

Ocean Obs 09
A decade ago in 1999, the first OceanObs conference was held. Researchers and oceanographers from around the world gathered to consolidate plans for a comprehensive ocean observing system able to deliver systematic global information about the physical environment of the oceans. This year's OceanObs'09 conference, which took place from September 21st to the 25th in Venice, Italy, celebrated a decade of progress and made a major contribution to charting the way forward for the coming decade.

VEMCO President & CEO, Sandra Greer, attended the conference and presented a poster entitled "Adding Animal Movement Data to Ocean Observing Systems." The objective of this presentation was to show how the idea of adding animal movement data from current acoustic fish tags and future "Integrated Tags" to existing and future Ocean Observation Systems provides information of high economic value and complements biologging data which is only obtainable from larger fish because of the size of the tags.

Australian Acoustic Tracking and Monitoring System (AATAMS) Acoustic Telemetry Workshop
In November, Sandra Greer and Dale Webber of VEMCO attended an AATAMS Workshop at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, Sydney, Australia. Hosted by Dr. Rob Harcourt and Andrew Boomer of AATAMS and sponsored by VEMCO, the workshop was well attended with approximately 50-70 researchers and students from various agencies participating in three days of talks, discussions and demonstrations. The workshop was a huge success covering a wide variety of topics from site residency studies, wide scale fish movements, river migrations to multi-species interactions and the effects of divers on shark behavior.