Another day on the Fitzroy

[Douglas]

Saw some magic here in Rocky the other day that basically does away with the tagging system for data accumulation.

Local has bought a side-scan Biosonics sounder from the US and taught it to recognize fish shapes by modifying facial recognition technology used by security services and law enforcement agencies world-wide...

Biosonics scientific sounders start at about $100,000 US.

It can distinguish between barra and king for example and can also count them as well as give size.

So sounder can be told to reject data of barra and/or threadfin below a certain size or above a certain size.

I saw a section of river ( a couple of km long and both sides) that displayed on a map every fish that fell within the parameters set by the operator.

After a scan trip on each bank, that section of river showed 11,000 barra and king (each with an i/d number) that the sounder saw along with the GPS point at which it was seen.

Translated onto GE map.

Was purchased for business purposes for measuring aquatic biomass and doing things like showing the actual numbers and types of fish in a system, dam or anywhere else.

Imagine this thing being run past the mouths of the Mary/Alligator systems in the NT (or anywhere else) at spawning. It'd give you a map of every barra, gps, size etc of all barra taking part in that process.

It'll also recognize, count and GPS mark crocs or anything else that you want to teach it to look for. Run it up the Adelaide and it'll count the number of crocs, size and show where they are by GPS if you want.

I've never seen anything like it.

Here it is

https://www.biosonicsinc.com/products/dt-x-extreme/

Can look sideways and has low frequencies therefore range sideways isn't a problem. Can do that down to 38 khz (long range) or up to 1000 khz. Just pick which transducer to suit.

It also has manual control of pulse duration so can produce range resolution figures better than any auto CHIRP found on any of the modern expensive models.