| Summary: | Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2018. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-194). The recent fish population decline due to increased human presence has led to calls for predictive methods to help reverse or stabilize the situation. It has been difficult, however, to establish such methods primarily due to the technical obstacles in observing fish populations in natural habitats. Here we use acoustics to observe the ocean environment and study fish behavior during the critical spawning period over continental-shelf scales. Fish are known to be one of the main sources of strong natural returns in the continental-shelf environment, and so identified as a major source of clutter for wide-area undersea surveillance. The first continental-shelf scale acoustic measurements of Atlantic cod over thousands of square kilometers using towed source and receiver arrays were made by an international, multi-disciplinary team led by MIT researchers including myself in the historic Lofoten cod spawning ground in Norway during the peak spawning period in Winter 2014, where extensive but spatially discrete groups of spawning cod were successfully imaged. These initial instantaneous wide-area observations of cod aggregations suggest that these observed spawning groups have quantifiable properties that are linked to essential collective behavioral functions. We find that the mean group population per annual spawning season of Northeast Arctic cod over the entire spawning ground in Lofoten Norway is remarkably invariant across the available 30 years of line-transect survey data. The marked stability of the annual mean spawning group size in contrast to the large variations in total spawning population across years supports the interpretation of the expected spawning group size over the 30-year data set as the group behavioral quantum empirically expected for reliable spawning. Time series of the total Atlantic cod ...
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