My favorite website of the day is Tracking of Pacific Predators. Why? It provides this bluefin tuna tracking widget:
Check out the numbers on this Tirion fella! He's traveled more than 40,000 miles since being tagged in 2002. That's nearly 2 times around the earth, and, as this tuna's little blog points out, way farther than most humans travel. (Especially those of us locked in a web dungeon).
It's incredible to see this amazing tracking technology at work! The longevity of this technology allows for some fantastic data ... and storytelling ... for individual animals. Tirion is tagged with an Archival Tag, which allows for up to 10 years of tracking. They are very light weight, and TOPP's fact page says they are surgically implanted in the tuna. Apparently, these tagging programs rely on enthusiastic fishermen to catch the fish for tagging and then catch them again to retrieve the tags.
That's not something that can be done with every ocean predator... just check out Oomo, the white shark:
His blog is pretty funny too, and I can't wait to have a portable web device so I can stand in the ocean and double check this guy's location. TOPP tracks the white sharks using pop-up archival tags. These pop-up tags have much shorter (2 week) battery life and they have to be retrieved physically to get all the data.
Just fascinating! If you like interactive ocean data, do yourself a favor and spend hours on TOPP. It's awesome.
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