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ESR SPECIAL PrePrint (2009) - Abstract

Inter-animal telemetry: results from first deployment of acoustic ‘business card’ tags

Kim N. Holland1,*, Carl G. Meyer1, Laurent C. Dagorn1,2

1Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii, PO Box 1346, Kaneohe, Hawaii 96744, USA
2Institut de Recerche pour le Développement (IRD France), BP 570,Victoria, Mahé, Seychelles

ABSTRACT: Prototype acoustic ‘business card’ (BC) tags were deployed on 4 free-swimming Galapagos sharks Carcharhinus galapagensis associated with a shark ecotourism operation near Haleiwa, Hawaii, USA. These transmitter/receiver tags employed mobile peer-to-peer (MP2P) technology that allowed the tagged sharks to exchange codes among each other and to detect other sharks implanted with standard one-way coded acoustic transmitters. Two tags were recovered (after 20 and 132 d); both tags had multiple detections of all other BC tags, and a comparison of detections made by these tags to those made by a fixed array of standard VR2 receivers indicated that the BC tags accurately captured the ‘presence-absence’ patterns of the other tagged sharks. Importantly, the BC tags detected sharks that were beyond the range of the fixed receiver array. The results indicate that the BC tag/MP2P approach can elucidate important inter-and intra-specific interactions among individuals in areas remote from traditional fixed receiver arrays.


KEY WORDS: Business card tags · MP2P · Shark movements · Inter-animal telemetry


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This article appears in ESR SPECIAL:
Biologging Technologies: New Tools for Conservation