SEMINAR: OI Seminar Series - Dr Adrian Gleiss

Title: A life ruled by motion: application of vertebrate activity sensing

Abstract: Activity and mobility play key roles in the lives of animals as these are related to the acquisition of resources, evasion from predators or as part of maintaining animals in an appropriate environment. Thus understanding the behaviour and ecology of most animals greatly benefits from an understanding of activity and its cost in particular. Despite the critical importance of activity and energetics, few methods have emerged that are able to quantify the movement of animals with sufficient detail under field conditions. The recent advances in solid-state technology now permit equipping free-ranging animals with small transducers able to accurately quantify activity and energetics via tri-axial accelerometers. I will give a brief overview how accelerometers work how they can be applied to a wide suite of animals, ranging from Ningaloo’s whale sharks, elephant seals in the Southern Ocean, leatherback turtles of the Caribbean to the sawfish of the Fitzroy River. I will discuss how accelerometers have allowed us to show how the underwater swimming of marine animals is functionally similar to bird-flight and how the leatherback turtle manages controls its buoyancy in order to dive to depths in excess of 1000m.