A while back I promised to post a little description of what I'm doing for my thesis research. It's taken quite a while for me to get around to it, but here it is.
I'm researching the movements and behaviors of white croaker in the Los Angeles and Long Beach Harbors. What I'm doing is surgically implanting acoustic transmitters inside the peritoneal cavity of the fish, which allow me to follow both the fine-scale and long-term movements of tagged individuals.
24 individual white croaker are to be tagged with transmitters that ping every 2 seconds. These transmitters can be followed in real-time using a small boat equipped with a hydrophone and tracking receiver to detect the signals from the transmitters. This is a technique known as "active tracking" and yields very high-resolution data regarding the fine-scale movements of the fish. Active tracking will be performed for multiple continuous 24 hour periods for each fish.
100 individuals are to be tagged with transmitters that ping every 30-90 seconds. These transmitters are designed to be detected by 12 automated acoustic monitors placed in strategic locations throughout the harbors. This is known as "acoustic monitoring". The battery life of these transmitters last for approximately 6 months, so the tagging effort will be split into two separate efforts of 50 tags each separated by about 6 months in order to characterize the movements of the species over the course of roughly a year.
Using these two methods in conjunction will allow me to characterize the movements of these fish within the harbors on both fine and broad scales. All movement data will be uploaded into ArcGIS for analysis.
I hope that answers a few questions in case anyone was curious about what I'm up to. If there's anything else anyone wants to know, don't hesitate to ask.
