Ocean Zooglider: an autonomous vehicle for optical and acoustic sensing of zooplankton and suspended particles
- 1Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, USA (sgastauer@ucsd.edu)
- 2Thünen-Institute of Sea Fisheries, Bremerhaven, Germany (sven.gastauer@thuenen.de)
- 3NIWC Pacific, San Diego, United States of America (jellen@cs.ucsd.edu)
Zooglider is an autonomous buoyancy-driven ocean glider designed and built by the Instrument Development Group at Scripps. Zooglider includes a low power camera with a telecentric lens for shadowgraph imaging and two custom active acoustics echosounders (operated at 200/1000 kHz). A passive acoustic hydrophone records vocalizations from marine mammals, fishes, and ambient noise. The imaging system (Zoocam) quantifies zooplankton and ‘marine snow’ as they flow through a sampling tunnel within a well-defined sampling volume. Other sensors include a pumped Conductivity-Temperature-Depth probe and Chl-a fluorometer. An acoustic altimeter permits autonomous navigation across regions of abrupt seafloor topography, including submarine canyons and seamounts. Vertical sampling resolution is typically 5 cm, maximum operating depth is ~500 m, and mission duration up to 50 days. Adaptive sampling is enabled by telemetry of measurements at each surfacing. Our post-deployment processing methodology classifies the optical images using advanced Deep Learning methods that utilize context metadata. Zooglider permits in situ measurements of mesozooplankton and marine snow - and their natural, three dimensional orientation - in relation to other biotic and physical properties of the ocean water column. Zooglider resolves micro-scale patches, which are important for predator-prey interactions and biogeochemical cycling.
How to cite: Gastauer, S., Ellen, J. S., and Ohman, M. D.: Ocean Zooglider: an autonomous vehicle for optical and acoustic sensing of zooplankton and suspended particles, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-8658, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-8658, 2021.