This year, Ocean Networks Canada launched a series of new deep-sea scientific experiments on NEPTUNE observatory. One such experiment is the deployment of whale bones at nearly 900 m depth in Barkley Canyon site, in front of our POD3 camera.

The underwater 3D reconstruction has been a popular topic in computer vision research community for the last decade and it still remains a challenging problem. The Computing Science laboratory at the University of Alberta (Dr. Herb Yang’s Lab) has been a long-time partner of Ocean Networks Canada in improving the 3D camera technology in the ocean.

Friday Sept 19th, 2014 marks a milestone as it will be the 10th in a series of carcass deployments in the Salish Sea. Almost a decade ago, Dr. Verena Tunnicliffe saw me give a talk at the University of Victoria on forensic entomology and she invited me ‘on board’ VENUS to deploy a pig carcass as a human proxy under a camera at the bottom of the Saanich Inlet. I was the first external researcher in VENUS.

Dr. Miriam Römer, a research scientist with the MARUM Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, spent the past 3 months working with Ocean Networks Canada staff scientists analyzing a large and disparate collection of data from Clayoquot Slope.

A winter's passage has been captured by cameras and instruments measuring ice thickness, salinity, oxygen and and phytoplankton abundance in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

The little crawler that could, couldn't for a while. Then it could again, thanks to skillful and persistent efforts by a scientist driving it from the other side of the planet.

A new batch of interesting talks and posters were presented at the February 2014 Ocean Sciences Meeting by scientists using Ocean Networks Canada data and facilities.

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As the ice returns to cover much of the Arctic coastal waters, Ocean Networks Canada's community observatory at Cambridge Bay marks its first year of continuous operations.

In the terrestrial world, we rely heavily on optics and our vision, and less so on acoustics and hearing. In the ocean, the opposite is true. In coastal waters, light only travels relatively short distances (5-20m), so marine animals use light for sensing only the very near-field environment, while sound can travel huge distances (1-1000km), and informs marine animals of distant features and events. Marine scientists also take advantage of the efficiency with which sound travels in the ocean, and use it to both investigate and listen to phenomena over long distances.

Passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammals is a growing research theme on both the VENUS and NEPTUNE observatories. University of Victoria Co-op student Jasper Kanes works with the Ocean Networks Canada Innovation Centre (formerly Centre for Enterprise and Engagement, ONCCEE) to process passive acoustic data from their technology demonstrations. Together with John Dorocicz, Acoustic Systems Developer, the two “listeners” publicize the highlights from these data within relevant research communities. 

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The MicroSquid experiment seeks to understand what drives changes in the rate of oxygen consumption by organisms living in and on seafloor sediment.

ONC staff have co-authored another Journal of Acoustical Society of America (JASA) paper in conjunction with first author Nathan D. Merchant of the University of Bath and researchers from the University of Aberdeen. ONC's Tom Dakin, Sensor and Instrument Technology business development officer, and John Dorocicz, Acoustic Systems Developer, contributed to the manuscript, and Jeff Bosma and Richard Dewey also assisted with field work for the paper, "Spectral probability density as a tool for ambient noise analysis."

The time lapse captures changes on the seafloor in Saanich Inlet at 96 metres depth as recorded by a VENUS camera in May 2012.

After more than a year in the making, we are happy to release our latest publication, An Invitation to Science, available in print, downloadable pdf and iBook formats.