Technologies Changing Insight Into Seas

On a sunny mid-October afternoon, Stanford University graduate student Chris Perle was out at sea, searching for a four-inch metallic gray object, resembling a small microphone with an antenna, adrift in the Pacific Ocean. One day earlier, the device, known as a "pop-up satellite archival tag," had popped off the fin of a female great white shark after 300 days of collecting data as the creature crisscrossed the ocean. Despite having its rough coordinates and $7,000 worth of monitoring equipment in hand, Perle and his colleagues could not find the tag, so he called back to marine sciences professor Barbara Block at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station...