Issue 10, December 2009

California State University Student Wins Award for "VPS Testing" Paper

As featured in our last issue of the VEMCO Monitor, the Cal State Long Beach Shark Lab has spent the last year testing VEMCO's fine-scale VR2W Positioning System (VPS) which uses off-the-shelf transmitters and VR2W receivers.

Thomas Farrugia and Mario Espinoza along with their professor and advisor Chris Lowe learned that the VPS allows tracking of multiple fish simultaneously over a much longer time interval than is possible with active tracking - and with less effort.

This past summer at the 2009 American Elasmobranch Society meetings in Portland, Oregon, Farrugia won an award for "Best Student Paper" for his presentation entitled "Testing a New Long-term Fine-scale Positional System for Tracking Multiple Fish Simultaneously", which focused on how the VPS data compared to that of active tracking. Farrugia and the research team concluded that the data was very comparable.

Farrugia, Espinoza and Lowe, in collaboration with VEMCO, are also currently working on an article for publication in a scientific journal that will be submitted within the next couple of months.