Putting tags in the researcher's toolkit: An examination of the strengths, limitations, and added-value from animal tagging

Abstract

The US Navy, through the Office of Naval Research and other offices, has focused on improving animal tags, reducing cost, and increasing availability. From data-rich packages like video and acoustic dataloggers to simple location-only tags, tags provide a variety of new data to studies of marine animals and their ecosystems. Tags realize their full potential when calibrated or validated against other existing alternative sensor systems like visual surveys, photo-identification, genetics, and acoustic monitoring. When tag cost, cost of delivery and recovery or monitoring are weighed against the data uniquely available from tags, an integrated data collection strategy involving animal tagging can be developed to generate the best data at the optimal total cost for a given research or resource management scenario.