Marlin

Tim Sippel is a PhD student at the SPCMS working on striped marlin and bluefin tuna.  He's been involved with striped marlin satellite tagging since arriving at the laboratory at Leigh from the USA in 2002. 

The initial success of satellite tagging striped marlin provided a building block for expansion of this research in New Zealand.  The striped marlin and bluefin tuna research is being conducted in partnership with Blue Water Marine Research in Northland, NZ, and with an international programme called Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP).  (Pelagic means swimming in the open ocean and pelagics include key Pacific predators such as tunas, billfishes, sharks, marine mammals.)

 TOPP is one of the cornerstone projects of the Census of Marine Life, a global effort to map and catalogue past, present and future oceanic systems.  One of the key aims of TOPP is to provide a framework for sustainable resource management and marine conservation.  It is jointly run by Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, University of California Santa Cruz's Long Marine Laboratory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Pacific Fisheries Ecosystems Laboratory:
http://www.toppcensus.org/web/Background/Overview.aspx.

Through links to TOPP, regular updates of marlin tagged by Tim Sippel can be viewed on the non-TOPP website hosted by the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics programme: http://las.pfeg.noaa.gov/nonTOPPtags/


Movement track of a striped marlin carrying a satellite telemetry tag from Eastern Bay of Plenty to French Polynesia in 2007

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