Friday November 11, 2011
Perhaps we should give Mike Rowe from the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs a call to help us with this project. This technician is sanding a PIT tag antenna cast in resin to get a good fit and a clean, smooth finish. One advantage of using half-duplex (HDX) PIT tags is the flexibility to custom fabricate antennas for many applications. This antenna was specifically designed to operate on the bottom of a round aquaculture tank in order to detect and log tags that fall to the bottom. It will be used in a study to evaluate the rate at which a tag passes through a striped bass’ digestive system. The results will help us understand what happens when a tagged salmon is consumed by a predator during salmon telemetry studies. Striped bass will be fed a salmon smolt with a surgically implanted tag and researchers will record how long it takes until the tag is defecated. It appears that this is a dirty job on many levels.