August 24, 2026 — Research ships from the marine research alliance California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations , or CalCOFI, have surveyed ocean conditions off the West Coast for more than 75 years.
Last spring, the ship surveying waters off Southern California had company.
Two autonomous underwater gliders, operated by NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center, shadowed the NOAA ship Bell M. Shimada as it transited survey stations. The gliders lingered at certain stations. One gathered observations over about 10 days compared to the ship’s visit of about 2 hours. Another glider sampled a different station for 3 days.
That made a world of difference, researchers said. The gliders will likely help fulfill CalCOFI’s mission of informing stock assessments vital to fisheries management.
One glider arrived at a survey station several days before the ship, sampled alongside it, and then stayed to sample for several days after the ship departed. The glider tracks zooplankton moving up and down in the water as night turns to day. It collects high-resolution shadowgraph images of the tiny organisms at the base of the marine food chain and their distribution through the water. The ship, by comparison, gathers the creatures in fine nets that lump them together with no sense of how deep or how spread out they were.