Fish tagging via RFID and bluetooth: Crowdsourced fish tracking through better reporting tools

Conventional tagging methods using plastic streamer tags have been the most widely used tool for elucidating fish movements in the last half century. With a very high failure rate, these methods for fish tagging and tracking are unreliable and prohibitively expensive for tracking global fish populations. Under the current method, fishermen are required to remember the time and location of the catch, the size of the fish, and the weight of the fish. In order to report a tagged fish, a fisherman cuts off and keeps the tag from the fish. Later, the fisherman must go back and submit the form using the information they can remember from earlier in the day or even several days ago. The long delay and relative difficulty between catch and data entry creates a barrier to data collection. The Olin College of Engineering Intelligent Vehicles Laboratory, in partnership with The Large Pelagics Research Center, has been developing a new, automated method for reporting data from fish tags. In the proposed process, a fish will be tagged with a modified streamer (“spaghetti”) tag carrying a rice grain RFID chip. A fisherman can scan the tag at or near the moment of capture with a compatible RFID reader, which will transmit the fish's data file to a personal smartphone pre-installed with our reporting application (the HI Tag App). From the application, the fisherman has the option to save the form directly as generated, input any missing data, or add richer data (i.e. a photo of the fish) before saving the form and storing the data on internal memory. When the application has detected a cellular or wireless connection, the data will be immediately uploaded to the Pacific Islands Fisheries Group database. Tests conducted off the island of Hawaii (Summer 2016) demonstrated that the HI Tag application greatly improved the process of fish tagging and reporting with respect to automating the process of collecting, parsing, and transmitting data without requiring supervision from the user. In this way, the reporting can be integrated into the fishing experience itself. Minimizing the barrier between catching and reporting the fish should create a direct relationship between identifying and reporting the tag, thereby improving “catch and release” fishing activities while enabling scientists and researchers access to richer data, collected from the same tag over the entire lifetime of a fish.