Animals like sharks, penguins, and turtles could help us monitor oceans through the transmission of oceanographic information from electronic tags.
Thousands of marine animals are tagged for various research and conservation resources. At the present, however, the information gathered from them is not used widely to track climate change and other shifts in the ocean.
Research vessels, underwater drones and thousands of floating sensors instead are used in monitoring the ocean.
However, large areas of the ocean still remain under-sampled - leaving gaps in our knowledge.
A team led by the University of Exeter says animals carrying sensors can fill many of these gaps through natural behaviour such as diving under ice, swimming in shallow water or moving against currents.
"We want to highlight the massive potential of animal-borne sensors to teach us about the oceans," said lead author Dr David March, of Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
"This is already happening on a limited scale, but there's scope for much more.
More details about this over at EurekAlert.
(Image Credit: Miquel Gomila/SOCIB)