Calculating the ecological impacts of animal-borne instruments on aquatic organisms

1. Animal-borne instruments provide researchers with valuable data to address important questions on wildlife ecology and conservation. However, these devices have known impacts on animal behaviour and energetics. Tags deployed on migrating animals may reduce reproductive output through increased energy demands or cause phenological mismatches of foraging and nesting events. For marine organisms, the only tagging guidelines that exist are based on lift and thrust impacts on birds – concepts that do not translate well to aquatic animals. Herein, we provide guidelines on assessing drag from animal-borne instruments and discuss the ecological impacts on marine organisms. Of particular concern is the effect of drag from instruments to the welfare of the animals and for the applicability of collected data to wild populations. 2. To help understand how drag from electronic tags affects marine animals in the wild, we used marine turtles as model aquatic organisms and conducted wind tunnel expe...