"Very" Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Drs. Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen and Kristin Laidre of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk, Greenland contacted WET Labs to assist them with their studies of the behavior of bowhead whales. Our ECO FLNTU combination chlorophyll fluorometer and scattering meter with internal logging and batteries and optional depth and temperature sensors gave them a package with the critical measurement parameters they needed for their research in a single compact instrument.

The red box depicts the area in Disko Bay where the bowhead whales were photographed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Data (left) collected during the deployment tracked the whale's movements through the surface phytoplankton maxima and as it dove into the warmer water of the West Greenland Current.

 

 

 

 

 

An important design criterion was that the total package needed to be small enough to be deployed with their current methods. Our standard FLNTUSB comes with enough memory and integrated batteries to provide 60,000 samples over months of deployment. Because each deployment in the bowhead whale study lasts only several days, we customized the instrument by reducing the length and battery load. Working with Drs Heide-Joregensen and Laidre, we also designed and built the flotation package to hold the ECO and the radio transmitters they need to locate the package after it breaks free from the whale. The photos of a bowhead whale in Disko Bay in April 2005 show the first deployment of the system.