OceanSpace, LLC

I continue to be impressed with the capabilities of our Aquatic Imager hardware/software package. South Florida Water Management District staff have initiated a zooplankton monitoring program in the St. Lucie Estuary of Southeast Florida. A ‘taxon’ of interest is fish eggs. As I mentioned in a previous post, OceanSpace staff conducted side-by-side sampling of our imager with their plankton net, but we had few fish eggs in our training library so we did not classify any of our images as fish eggs although they were retrieved from the net sample. To further investigate, SFWMD staff sent a sample of fish eggs for imaging and training library development. For this purpose, I ran fish egg samples through both our mono and our color units, and tested three lighting combinations in each. Although these eggs were roughly 1 mm diameter, with some variation potentially due to species-specific differences, we were able to obtain clear and distinct images. The eggs are pretty opaque, which resulted (in my opinion) in the color system with balanced front- and back-light delivering better images. But see for your yourself (increments are 1 mm)....

This week Dr. Arnold conducted a product demonstration with interested staff members from Brevard County Natural Resources and from the Marine Discovery Center in New Smyrna Beach. The demonstration went well and included extensive discussion regarding deployment, performance, and image classification aspects of the OceanSpace Aquatic Imager. Later this same week, Bill attended an NSF-funded workshop (Building the Blue - Identifying Educational Requirements of the Future Ocean Technical Workforce) held at St Petersburg College and with a keynote address by Edie Widder. Discussion focused on training and skills needed by the next generation of ocean industry experts. Definitely one of the most insightful and productive workshops he has attended. Kudos to Erica Moulton and her team!

This week Dr. Arnold will work with staff from the Brevard County Natural Resources office, and the Marine Discovery Center in New Smyrna Beach, to demonstrate operation and performance of the Aquatic Imager in the waters of Sykes Creek, a small tributary of the Indian River Lagoon. This opportunity serves both to educate potential users and to continue expansion of our organism training library. If the weather holds and all goes well, we’ll provide an update in next week’s post.

This week, we are shining a spotlight on an incredible journey that’s just begun: Karsen Henwood, our talented taxonomic expert, has embarked on her Ph.D. adventure at the USF College of Marine Science! 🎓 Her focus on biological oceanography and, specifically, zooplankton, is not just a personal milestone; it's a significant contribution to our understanding of marine ecosystems. As she dives deeper into her research, Karsen will continue to assist part-time at OceanSpace Sensors, where she will share her expertise when she can. Let’s rally together to support Karsen on this new chapter! 🎉 Drop a comment below to wish her luck or share your own experiences in pursuing advanced studies. Go Bulls! #MarineScience #Oceanography #PhDJourney

The OceanSpace team will be exhibiting at the Marine Technology Society Ocean Biodiversity TechSurge! The meeting will be held October 1-2, 2024, at the Baltimore Inner Harbor. Visit our booth during the Day 1 Networking Reception to meet us, learn more about the OS Aquatic Sensor, and discuss Aquatic Sensor applications that will assist your efforts to manage and improve our aquatic ecosystems. #OBTS24 #OceanBiodiversity #MarineTechnology

Remember how, in July, OceanSpace went out on the water with South Florida Water Management District staff in the St. Lucie estuary to conduct side-by-side comparisons of our Small Aquatic Organism imaging system and their standard net sampling protocol? Well... we have results! The samples collected in the filter box were identified by SFWMD staff and images from the SAO Imager were analyzed by our staff. The methods exhibited many of the same groups, including crab zoea, cumaceans, shrimp zoea, and more (Enlarged images may cause blurriness). In other good news, our classifier was successful in classifying the organisms!

This week we obtained some ctenophore (Mnemiopsis leidyi) samples from Dr. William Browne at UM (thank you, Bill!) as a means to challenge the Aquatic Imager's capability for imaging gelatinous zooplankton. We tested a variety of lighting options involving no backlight, no frontlight, and various combinations of more/less of each. For this image we increased the backlight relative to the frontlight. Note that increments are 1 mm.

All work and no play… I ride 30-35 miles each week. It’s a great way to clear the head and keep the body strong, as long as the automobile pilots are paying attention. Nineteen out of 20 do, but safety depends on that 20th car. Of course, all play and no work doesn’t pay the bills. This week Karsen is finishing up her work to validate a complete set of images from our October Tampa Bay sampling event, which will then be used to expand the data set processed through our confusion matrix and further improve our classification accuracy. In the meantime, I’m validating images collected from the St. Lucie Estuary while our South Florida Water Management District colleagues process the preserved samples for comparison. The rest of the team is staying busy too. Milton is completing unit fabrications, Kurt is advancing the performance capabilities of his exceptional Image Manager tool, and Eric is maintaining our electronics packages. As an essential next step, we’re finalizing an agreement for marketing, sale, and support of our SAO Imager system. Stay tuned.

Lengthy sampling event at Carlsbad desal facility Last week we ran our optical imaging system, deployed at the Channelside desalination facility in Carlsbad CA, continuously for seven days without a hitch. During the deployment, we collected image data remotely (from St. Petersburg) on a periodic basis throughout the diel cycle and especially at dawn and dusk. With the assistance of taxonomic experts, we are developing our Southern California image training library, which we will use to classify the 300 gb (compressed to 100 gb for transfer) of data collected last week as well as images previously collected during site visits and remote operations. Our success with remote operation, including our ability to sample during off hours (e.g., nighttime) when legacy sampling in nearshore and estuarine environments is rarely done, testifies to the potential of the OceanSpace SAO Imager for deployment in remote locations including aboard uncrewed surface vessels. Such long-term deployments will reveal diel patterns of zooplankton community dynamics that have important implications for understanding and managing aquatic ecosystems.

As promised in my last post, we worked with South Florida Water Management District staff in the St. Lucie estuary last week to conduct side-by-side comparisons of our Small Aquatic Organism imaging system and their standard net sampling protocol. It took some work and customization to adapt the sampling collection hardware to the SFWMD vessel, but once the SAO Imager was set up all went well. As illustrated in the video, we used a filter box to collect organisms following passage through the imaging chamber. This enables us to validate by comparing imaged to captured organisms and to compare both to legacy net sampling outcomes. Although data from the imager are ready to go, it will take longer to sort and ID the samples collected by the net and filter box. When all is done, we'll post our results.