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Finding Fish in Tjärnö Bay

Team eFISHency are currently situated at the Tjärnö Marine Centre, we arrived on the 12th August 2018 (well, most of us did), and we will spend our time joint school carrying out a short investigation on the marine life in and around Tjärnö.

What are we doing?

Over the next 10 days our team will be trying to discover which species of fish call beautiful Tjärnö Bay home, and how many there are. Our idea is simple: film the fish with baited cameras in different locations to compare different habitat types, and back this up with an underwater snorkel survey. Simple in theory, possibly not so simple in practice…
We will make videos for six different sites with three different habitat types (seagrass, sandy, and harbour) and compare what we can see in the videos.

What do we hope to see?

FISH! (And possibly other scavengers such as crustaceans that have been attracted by the bait). Hopefully the videos will allow us to see the most abundant species and the species composition of fish in different habitats around the bay.

What did we do today?

We built our Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV) devices using material scavenged from around the Tjärnö Marine Centre. BRUV was then deployed in the harbour to test the image quality whilst the team scouted the sites around the bay, placing buoys to mark the perfect locations.

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Team eFISHency working on building BRUV, their new underwater best friend

We discovered that our BRUV device works (brilliant!), but that the camera lens was covered in seaweed and thus the footage was unusable (less brilliant). We also discovered that mud is very, very easy to sink into when placing marker buoys.
Tomorrow is the official first day of the real investigation, fingers crossed that everything goes according to plan!

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What are we making here? A mess. We are making a mess.

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