Word: sonar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...perhaps a virtual fence underwater? British defence firm QinetiQ has adapted its military underwater sonar system, Cerberus, into the private yacht market. It creates an underwater acoustic perimeter around a vessel that triggers an alert when broken. It "would identify an underwater swimmer, scuba diver or vehicle coming in under the water," said a company spokesman...
...when E.U. ministers meet to thrash out the quotas, concerns about the survival of stocks comes in conflict with sustaining the livelihoods of Europe's fishermen. Although the fishing community has seen its own numbers shrink drastically in recent years, its efficiency has improved dramatically thanks to innovations like sonar, trawler freezers, and driftnets up to 1.5 miles (2.5km) wide. The result has been a vacuuming of fish across the seas and a collapse of key stocks...
...According to Wang Ding, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology and a leading expert on the baiji, damming on the river and noise from heavy boat traffic may have disoriented the dolphins, which are mostly blind and search for food in the sandy shallows using sonar. The confused and starving animals may then have wandered into boat propellers. Heavy dredging in shipping channels could also have made it harder for the animals to locate each other and hunt for increasingly scarce fish. "Dredging is a very serious problem," Wang says. "It destroys spawning grounds of fish. There...
...feeling their way through the water. Capt. Bill Chandler of the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department supervises the rescue divers, a group of 20 people from several locales, working in groups of three: one person in the water while the other two provide backup. The divers, he said, use sonar to identify potential submerged vehicles. They then carefully make their way to the target and identify what...
...sushi. European Union fishing subsidies haven't helped, either - they enable fishermen to buy new boat engines, the better to compete against the high-tech fleets that have set up in the Mediterranean. Many Spanish and French fishing companies have used the subsidies to overhaul their fleets, installing sonar systems and new engines and hugely increasing capacity. "Fishermen used to have old wooden boats, but now most boats in the Mediterranean are brand new," says Alain Fonteneau, a marine biologist for the French government-run Institute of Development Research in Montpellier. Other technologies have contributed; tuna-ranching companies fly spotter...