Equipment to tag, track and collect biopsies from whales and dolphins: the ARTS, DFHorten and LKDart systems

Abstract

Of all animals considered subjects for instrumentation for behavioral or physiological studies, cetaceans probably represent the greatest challenge to the engineer and biologist. Both the marine environment being harsh to electronics and the short time window available to attach instruments imply a need for innovative tagging solutions to facilitate better understanding of their life cycle, migration, physiology, behavior, health and genetics. Several sensor packages holding specific data loggers e.g., time depth recorders, position, orientation, acoustic and video recorders for short to medium term studies, as well as tags developed for large scale migration telemetry studies are available as off-the-shelf devices, or in many cases as custom made sensor packages. Deployment of those instruments is often the limiting factor for data collection. The Aerial Remote Tag System (ARTS) is a flexible system which can easily be adapted to deploy different tag sensor packages and biopsy collection devices. This paper presents the history and design of the ARTS, and accessories developed for instrumentation and biopsy sampling of cetaceans, such as the recent developed ARTS-LKDart for biopsy sampling. Deployment of archival tags usually requires radio tracking of the instrumented animal, or at least tracking of the tag for recovery. Thus, we also here describe the digital signal processing radio direction finder, Direction Finder Horten (DFHorten unit).

Foraging movements of humpback whales relate to the lateral and vertical distribution of capelin in the Barents Sea

“…Ten subdermally-anchored satellite tags (5 SPOT-303 tags and 5 SPLASH-302 tags, Wildlife Computers, Redmond, WA) were deployed using an Aerial Rocket Tagging System (ARTS, Kleivane et al, 2022) following best tagging practices described by Andrews et al (2019). Specifically, whales were slowly approached and tagged from a 20 ft open rigid inflatable boat.…”