Developing an acoustic tag with bidirectional communications capabilities

. The study of marine animal behaviour is crucial to manage fisheries stocks and to understand the climate change effect on them, especially their moving patterns. In order to achieve that, different methods have been developed during the last years, specially using acoustic tags. However, all the tags available nowadays are transmitters, and therefore, can only be used as a “listen method”. Here, we present a new acoustic tag with bidirectional communications capabilities (i.e. can transmit and also receive acoustic signals). This approach will allow the possibility to use new techniques to study marine animals (e.g. range-only and singe-beacon methods with autonomous vehicles), and therefore, increase the knowledge of their behaviour. Keywords— acoustic tag, tagged animals, underwater target localization, autonomous vehicle, acoustics