Today@Dal

From CBC News online, August 22:

In the deep waters off Sambro, N.S. on Wednesday, scientists and fishermen successfully recovered a solar-powered robot that communicates with satellites to solve mysteries about the lives of fish.

Dalhousie's Ocean Tracking Network is on a mission to find out where fish in the waters surrounding the Maritimes go, and why.

The OTN deployed the robot, called a Wave Glider and made by Liquid Robotics, equipped with a sensitive acoustic receiver in the Gulf northwest of Stephenville, N.L on June 19. The glider spent nearly two months at sea and travelled more than 3,000 kilometres.

Acoustic tags, small sound-emitting devices, were mounted on salmon that were released earlier this year from various rivers along the New Brunswick and the Quebec coast, enabling researchers to track their migration.

...

The glider looks like a high-tech surfboard. The autonomous robot, or drone, has two components, a surface component and an undersea component.

The surface component includes a solar panel, batteries and computer storage capable of storing up to six terabytes of data.

The undersea component has a series of wings that use the motion of ocean waves to propel the drone forward at an average speed of about 1.5 knots.

Read the rest of this article at cbc.ca.

Read also: High-tech tracker hits the waves (The Chronicle Herald)