Fish and plankton acoustics @ IEO Baleares

“One of the more serious constraints in fisheries acoustics is that innovation has been suppressed in favor of standardization.” (Holliday and Pieper, 1995).

The main objective of the acoustic group ACUSDEEP is to generate knowledge about the unknow mesopelagic (200-1000 m) and bathypelagic (1000-2000 m) habitats by means of acoustic techniques. The development of new equipment and processing techniques open new areas of research that allow us to study these challenging species. The relevant implication of these species in the biological pump, trasporting carbon from the ocean surface to deep waters and the imminent creation of new fisheries based on some of them have increased the number of scientific projects targeting them exponentially.

Keywords: mesopelagic, bathypelagic, Myctophidae, Cyclothone spp, krill, decapods, migration, noise, acoustic masking, signal processing, machine learning

Main lines of research

• Main species: Myctophidae, Stomiiforms, Sternoptychidae, Euphasiids, Decapoda…
• Development of acoustic processing algorithms for denoising, identification, behaviour inference and quantification of marine organisms
• New acoustic equipment: ME70, EK80, AZFP
• Disentangling of meso and bathypelagic scattering layers.
• Geographical and vertical distributions. Water masses influences.
• Behavioural studies: Migration, orientation, day-night and seasonal and inter-annual variations.
• Biological pump
• Active-passive acoustics