Gliders

The Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) operates the most expansive academic fleet of marine autonomous vehicles in Canada—eleven Teledyne Webb Slocum gliders and three Liquid Robotics Wave Gliders. 

Gliders are a safe, energy-efficient tool for revealing life underwater. These autonomous vehicles can travel thousands of kilometres for months at a time, collecting data on marine animals and ocean ecosystems.

OTN’s gliders have completed over 200 missions, travelling more than 189,654 km in support of animal tracking and oceanographic monitoring in Atlantic Canada, the Arctic, and beyond. From 2011 to the end of 2024, OTN’s gliders were in the water for a combined 6,744 days.

Used in several areas of OTN’s research—including servicing moored equipment, as mobile acoustic receiver platforms, and monitoring whale distributions—gliders operate at a fraction of the cost of conducting ocean sampling by ship and reduce risk for field personnel.

OTN, the University of New Brunswick (UNB), Transport Canada and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have been collaborating since 2020 to monitor right whales in near real-time in shipping lanes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence using gliders. When right whale calls are detected in shipping lanes, Transport Canada issues mandatory speed reduction orders for all vessels more than 13 metres in length to decrease the risk from vessel collisions.

In 2021, UNB and OTN were jointly awarded $2.8 million in project funding from Transport Canada for monitoring of North Atlantic right whales for five years in the Gulf of St. Lawrence using gliders. This effort built on pilot work in previous years in the Gulf showing that glider-based monitoring was an effective means of whale monitoring.

OTN’s glider expertise and capacity also supports complementary research initiatives at Dalhousie University, such as the Ocean Frontier Institute (oceanographic monitoring).

Liquid Robotics Wave Glider

• Wave Gliders are solar and wave powered.
• They collect information on weather and sea-surface conditions.
• Their primary purpose is to remotely off-load data from bottom-moored tracking stations through a subsurface acoustic modem. 

Teledyne Marine Slocum glider

• Slocum gliders are electrically powered.
• They spend the majority of their missions underwater collecting physical, biological and chemical information.
• While OTN Slocum gliders are primarily deployed in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, they have also carried out work in the Arctic and Pacific oceans.
• Slocum gliders are also equipped with the same tracking units that bioprobes (tagged animals) carry to detect other tagged animals it encounters at sea.