[Archival tags and geolocation methods for marine animals: A review].

ABSTRACT

Archival tags, a group of data storable electronic tags, are widely used as strong tools for obtaining long term and large scale activity information of marine animals, specifically highly migratory oceanic fishes, and corresponding environmental data. Though retrieving tags is an indispensable step for obtaining data, which is a shortage of archival tags, a series of achievements have been made on marine animals by using archival tags since the 1990s. With the appearance of pop-up satellite tag, which solved the problem of data retrieving and was fully independent of the fishing, both breadth and depth of marine animals' studies are extended by the end of the 1990s. Geolocation based on light intensity is the key to estimate marine animals' movement and has achieved some progress in the past 20 years. However, the accuracy of geolocation for latitude is not high enough, and there is still much room for improvement. To date, most geolocation methods that use ambient daylight involve identifying the times when the sun is at a precisely known zenith angle (e.g., sunrise and sunset). The problem of estimating longitude has been proved easy to solve, but accurate latitude estimates remain elusive. This paper mainly introduced two tags, i. e., archival tags and pop-up tags, and three geolocation methods, i.e. , 1) the "fixed reference" method, 2) the "variable reference" method, and 3) the "reflection" method. We also presented a prospect analysis on archival tags and possible research direction of geolocation methods. We believed that miniaturization and multi-sensor integration are the trends for electronic tags while more environmental factors such as depth, SST (sea surface temperature) or magnetic field intensity, instead of single factor, as auxiliary parameters would be used for improving the geolocation accuracy in the future.