NEWS

Debris-tracking transponders should be showing up soon

Henry Miller
Statesman Journal

They might look like soda bottles bobbing on the ocean or washed up on the shore, but these are treasure chests of digital information to scientists in Japan and the U.S.

And according to Sam Chan at Oregon State University they should start showing up in the Pacific Northwest now through spring.

Chan is a statewide aquatic invasive species and watershed health specialist with the Sea Grant Program at the university, which is coordinating with researchers from Tattori University for Environmental Studies in Japan to recover 30 transponders adrift on the Pacific.

The federal NOAA Marine Debris Program also is involved in the transponder-recovery efforts

An initial test launch of several of the devices in 2011 was to track the estimated 1.5 million tons of debris that was washed out to sea by the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

"The first release they did was a trial," Chan said. "They released three of them, and amazingly two of them have been recovered, one off of Arch Cape, and the other one off Haida Gwai (then the Queen Charlotte Islands) in British Columbia."

After pinging their positions to a satellite every 30 seconds 16 hours a day, the batteries in the transponders gave out before they reached the Pacific Northwest, making the recovery of two of the three even more remarkable, he added.

A year after the initial launch, Japanese scientists set 30 more transponders adrift. Those are the ones that should be showing up during the coming months.

Dead batteries or not, the electronic devices still provide a gold mine of stored data for scientists, Chan said.

"They contain a lot of information to help us track where marine debris might be going, and not just the tsunami debris, but other debris that is circling around in the ocean," he said.

Especially exciting to Chan is the potential to discover how marine invasive species clinging to or encrusted to debris arrives alive after drifting for up to three years across the Pacific.

"One of the questions that we have is how the invasive species have been able to move on that debris from Japan over to the U.S. given how long it's been in the ocean," he said "And knowing the history of the transponders allows us to know how much time it's spent hugging the coast.

"If they stay close to the coast, which has more nutrients, the organisms are able to feed. But if they spend a lot of time in the mid-ocean where the nutrients are very poor, then they shouldn't really be able to survive. That's why (recovering) these is really important."

If you're on the ocean or at the coast, here's what to look for:

"It probably would be a soda bottle, but it would have an antenna sticking out of it. And It will look different because it contains the electronics," Chan said.

The top of the plastic "soda bottle" casing originally was a bright orange,

"By the time they get here they might not be bright orange any more, they might be a faded yellowish orange," as the transponder from Haida Gwai was, Chan said.

"And it has the label on it ... in English and it says, 'this is a transponder. It's safe and it's part of a Japanese study to track plastic garbage,'" he said. There also is Japanese writing on it. The whole package weighs about a pound.

If you find what you think is a transponder, take a picture and email that to Chan at Samuel.Chan@oregonstate.edu or to Nir Barnea, the NOAA Marine Debris Program Pacific Northwest coordinator, at nir.barnea@noaa.gov

Once verified, you will get instructions and postage-paid shipping to get the transponder back to scientists.

hemiller@StatesmanJournal.com, (503) 399-6725 or follow at twitter.com/henrymillersj and friend or facebook.com/hmillersj

And this is what the transponder that was found off Haida Gwai (then the Queen Charlotte Islands) looked like after more than two years at sea.