In 1999, a bold plan was laid out to establish a broad collaboration among biologists, oceanographers, engineers and computer scientists in the emerging field of “biologging” science.  At a workshop held at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, more than 50 people gathered and developed a program using electronic tags to simultaneously follow the migrations and behaviors of 23 different species of marine animals – including whales, seals, fishes, sharks, seabirds, turtles and even squid.  The scientsts’ vision was that, by following such a dive

The white shark research team has published two papers in the past few days, documenting the ability to recognize individual sharks year after year by the distinctive shapes and markings on their dorsal fins; and then using this information to estimate the total size of the white shark population in this region. The first study, which was published March 1 in the journal Marine Biology (Anderson et.

Back in the early days of TOPP, one of our goals was to see if it might be possible to one day use the data we get from tagged animals to help us understand the ocean itself. This concept, which we dubbed "Animals as Ocean Sensors," came a giant step closer to reality last week, with the birth of a new partnership between GTOPP and the national Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS).

Daniel Costa, Jennifer Burns, Mary Zavanelli, Michelle Shero and Luis Huckstadt, from McMurdo Station, Antarctica -

Field team January 2011 with the last tagged Weddell seal . First row (left to right): Dr. Dan Costa, Dr. Mary Zavanelli. Standing (left to right): Luis Huckstadt, Dr. Jennifer Burns, Michelle Shero . Photo by Dan Costa. 

Luis Huckstadt, Patrick Robinson, Kim Goetz, Jen Maresh in McMurdo Station, Antarctica-

If you want to study top predators, you have to follow them. That's it, no way around it (or at least we like to see it that way). So, as the enthusiastic biologists that we are, we were somehow happy about the new challenge in sight: Go to the white continent to study Weddell seals (Part II) right when the "spring season" would be hitting the continent, and the weather was changing from horrible to bad.

The 2010 TOPP white shark tagging expedition to the Farallon Islands was lead by Dr. Salvador Jorgensen and began on October 7 aboard the S.R.V. Derek M. Bayliss.