When you are not busy home improving, you might like to keep your eye on the ‘mysterious travels’ of the great white shark and other magnificent marine creatures? A sleek, unmanned 
Wave Glider robot has been deployed off the US coast near San Francisco which is the latest addition to an arsenal of ocean observing technologies that you may wish to interrogate from time to time?
The self-propelled solar-power glider is part of a new network including data receivers on fixed buoys that will pick up signals from acoustic tags on animals passing within 1,000 feet and transmit the data to a research team on shore, led by Stanford University Marine Sciences Prof Barbara Block.
The long-lasting, relatively inexpensive acoustic tags and the local array of both fixed and mobile ocean transmitters will fine tune 12 years of insights gleaned from satellite-connected tags used to follow thousands of animals throughout their entire Pacific journeys.
Block and her team are on a mission to create a “wired ocean” where live feeds of predator movements are relayed by a series of “ocean WiFi hotspots” on moored buoys and self-propelled Wave Gliders carrying acoustic receivers.
The technology is central to Block’s “Blue Serengeti Initiative,” which builds on the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project, part of the international Census of Marine Life (2000-2010).
Barbara Block, says: “Our goal is to use revolutionary technology that increases our capacity to observe our oceans and census populations, improve fisheries management models, and monitor animal responses to climate change.”
The bright yellow, seven-foot long Wave Glider and fixed buoys is transmiting data this summer and autumn from animals off the California coast near San Francisco, between Monterey Bay and Tomales Point. In time she hopes to extend this ocean observing network down the entire west coast of North America, tracking animals that range in size from salmon smolts to large ocean going predators such as white, mako and salmon sharks.
Dan Basta, director of the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service, suggests: “Animals may tell us more about how the world works and is changing then any other source of knowledge.”
When Barbara Block has all of the oceans ‘wired-up’ to provide valuable climate change information from sea creatures, don’t forget you read about it first on the NHIC website!
High-res video of the Wave Glider launch: http://bit.ly/PnpaSi
More information: www.marine.stanford.edu/