And she's off!
Spotted eagle ray 106 is set free.
Only 15 minutes ago
she was swimming in these same
coastal waters off Sarasota, Florida.
Researcher Kim Bassos Hull
from nearby Mote Marine Laboratory
spied her from a boat.
What followed for the beautiful ray
was likely a surprise for her,
but routine for Kim and her team.
The very first thing we do
is scan them for PIT tags,
that will indicate whether
they have been caught before or not.
Once that's done, we take
a series of measurements
of the animal, including
how wide it is, how long it is,
what the head shapes are,
and things like that.
We take genetic clips
by taking the fin clips from
the pelvic fin area.
We collect a series
of photographs of the body.
There are very unique spot patterns
which are very important for use
in photo ID, for identifying individuals.
In addition, we collect blood samples
by turning the animal over.
They're upside down,
so, ventral side up, and they go into
sort of a trance-like state
that's called tonic immobility.
Once they relax into this state,
we're able to take a blood sample
from the base of their tail,
watching out for the spine,
you have to be very careful
because they have barbs that stick out.
These blood samples are then used
further on in some contaminant analyses.
Once the blood samples are collected,
we turn the animal back right-side up,
we put in a visual tag,
which is called a spaghetti tag,
weigh the animal, and then
the animal is released.
This whole process overall
takes about 10 to 15 minutes onboard
and then the animal is off on its way.
Kim and her team have done this
283 times over the past two years,
and even though each ray's work
is done in just 15 minutes,
for the scientists,
it's only the beginning.
When we come back off the boat,
we get back to the lab,
we download our GPS,
which has all our boat tracks
and our sightings.
This information and all our data
is entered into our sighting database.
The photographs that we take
are labeled and analyzed and cropped.
We have a special program
that we use called I3S, which is a
spot-pattern recognition program.
It was initially adapted for
looking at star-pattern matching.
During that time we also
take all of our genetic samples
and archive them and then
they're shipped off to Anna here
at the California Academy of Sciences.
We extract the DNA from
the tissue samples and after that
we isolate a particular
region of interest,
we amplify that region,
and we sequence the DNA
in that region.
Once we have sequences
for all of the animals
from different populations,
we're able to look for
differences between them.
This gives us an idea
of migration or movement
of the populations.
Because spotted eagle rays
are not very well studied,
and they are listed as near threatened,
we are interested to see
about the health of these populations:
how big are they,
whether they're declining or
increasing over time,
and how far they're moving.
And that allows us to
better understand how well
these populations will be able
to withstand changes
in their environment.
And their environment
is changing from pollution.
We are still investigating
the potential affects
of the BP oil spill in 2010
on spotted eagle ray populations
around the Gulf of Mexico.
What's important about
what we're doing is collecting
the baseline information
from our blood samples
that we're collecting.
One item of concern to us
is that in 2011, we observed half
the number of spotted eagle rays
in our study area per unit of effort
as compared to the past years.
To a large fishery in Mexico
that targets these rays
for consumption.
Right now we're interested
in looking at whether there are
differences between the population
we're sampling off of Florida,
and samples that we've gotten
that are collected from a targeted
spotted eagle ray fishery.
What we want to know is whether
the animals are from different populations
or whether in fact they're moving
across the Gulf of Mexico
and being taken by that fishery.
So while 106 swims on her merry way
across the Gulf,
Anna and Kim
are still hard at work using
the information she's provided
to help protect her future.