Monday November 29, 2021
Oregon Public Broadcasting —
Tracking some young salmon has always had one hitch: the tiny fish are too small for the injectable tags researchers use to track fish as they move past hydropower dams. To make the tags smaller, researchers also had to shrink the batteries that power the fish tags.
Now, new battery technology developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will allow researchers to better study small fish, such as juvenile sockeye salmon and Pacific lamprey.
Larger batteries have limited the size of fish tags, which means they can’t be injected into very small fish, said Daniel Deng, a mechanical engineer with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“Larger batteries automatically exclude many of those sensitive species that we want to study,” Deng said.