Monterey Bay Aquarium, MBARI, SharkEye, Adobe Stock-boxerx
OCEAN SCIENCE Shark Tracking
W
hen scientists tracked great white sharks
to a mysterious mid-Pacific hangout, they
nicknamed it the White Shark Café — are they
eating, or meeting? What’s going on out there?
Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA) researcher
Dr. Sal Jorgensen wanted eyes on the scene,
so he and engineer Thomas Maughan at sister
institution MBARI developed a Shark Café
Camera tracking tag with funding from the
Packard Foundation. Clamped to the dorsal
fin, it detects diving and chasing behaviors,
then triggers an off-the-shelf Sony Action Cam
to record video, and finally pops off and floats
for recovery. On its custom PCB you’ll find an
ATSAMD21 microcontroller (same as Adafruit’s
Feather M0 boards); a compass/IMU that senses
location, acceleration, and even tail beats; an
RGB light sensor; and a pressure-transducer
depth sensor (Figure
A
). A capacitive sensor
detects when it has returned to the surface, then
a satellite modem phones home.
If you dare to tag a shark, you can build your
44 makezine.com
Chasing chompers
with the latest tech
Written by Keith Hammond
HOW TO
TRACK A
SHARK
KEITH HAMMOND is senior
editor of Make: and spends
uncomfortable amounts of time
in shark-inhabited waters.
M78_044-45_SharkTracking_F1.indd 44M78_044-45_SharkTracking_F1.indd 44 7/11/21 10:02 AM7/11/21 10:02 AM
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