Cefas celebrates 10 years of tagging technology

Cefas has been a world leader in the development and use of electronic data storage tags, used primarily in fish behaviour studies in relation to their environment. The increasingly sophisticated tags have provided data for some important scientific breakthroughs since the first plaice were tagged by Cefas scientists and released in the North Sea close to Smith's Knoll, on 15th December 1993.

Dr Julian Metcalfe, who has been involved in the research from the start, celebrated this prestigious anniversary with a Cefas Christmas Lecture to a packed audience of scientists and non-specialists highlighting the highs and lows of this major research programme. 10 years ago, the research aimed to answer the question as to whether fish were using tidal patterns as an energy-saving conveyor belt system for moving around in the sea. When the first of the electronic tags was returned on 17th January 1994, scientists were amazed at how far an individual fish had travelled. As more and more tags were returned and the dataset grew, it became clear that studying fish behaviour was vital to the assessment and management of fish populations.

Today, the research theme continues with a number of high profile research projects investigating the behaviour of a variety of fish species. For example, CODYSSEY is an EU-funded collaboration of 9 science institutes, and aims to define characteristic behaviours and migrations of cod in four different ecosystems: the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Barents Sea and the Icelandic/Faeroe plateau. Cefas scientific expertise has also been deployed on plaice,  thornback rays, dogfish, tuna and basking sharks.