Issue 6, June 2008

On the Road with VEMCO

Throughout the year, VEMCO attends various conferences and tradeshows and occasionally conducts off-site workshops.

Up next on our conference agenda is the 8th International Congress on the Biology of Fish, Portland Oregon, July 28-August 1. Dale Webber, our resident Marine Biologist, is scheduled to co-host a Sensor Symposium. Please check our website soon as further details will be posted to our Education section (under Tradeshows and Conferences).

Later in the summer is the American Fisheries Society Annual General Meeting which is being held in Ottawa, Ontario, August 17-21. The theme of the meeting is "Fisheries in Flux: How Do We Ensure Our Sustainable Future". This theme reflects President Mary Fabrizio's Program of Work for her year in office, and addresses the ongoing challenge of confronting change when managing fisheries.

Along with exhibiting at the tradeshow, we will be conducting a half day workshop on acoustic telemetry on Sunday afternoon, August 21st, from 1:00-5:00pm. While there is no direct fee being charged for our workshop, you will need to register for the AFS meeting to be able to attend. We have also donated a VR100 acoustic receiver and a VH165 hydrophone to AFS for their end-of-event raffle.

This past May, we attended the Tuna Conference in Lake Arrowhead, California which is sponsored annually by the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA/NMFS and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. It is a meeting of persons with scientific or commercial interest in tunas and tuna fisheries and provides a forum for discussing progress in research on all aspects of tunas and other large pelagic marine species.

Earlier in May, we took our road show to Portland, Oregon for the Annual Meeting of the Western Division and Oregon Chapters of the American Fisheries Society (AFS) held May 4-9. The theme of the meeting, "Human Population Growth and Fisheries: The Western Challenge", was meant to promote the multidiscipline approach required to address the effects of human population growth on fisheries and habitat in the western United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Back in February, we exhibited at the International Symposium on Advances in Fish Tagging and Marking Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. The purpose of the symposium was to bring together global expertise on fish tagging techniques and interpretation of movement data, with presentations on satellite and data logging tags, acoustic and radio telemetry, new methods utilizing traditional internal and external tags, chemical and genetic marks, approaches that integrate two or more of these techniques, and innovative data analysis techniques.

A collaborative effort of the American Fisheries Society, the Australian Society for Fish Biology, and the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society, it is hoped that discussions held at this symposium will be the impetus for even greater advances in tagging for fisheries science.