Acoustic sampling of Antarctic krill with simulated underwater buoyancy gliders: Does the sawtooth dive pattern work?

Autonomous underwater gliders may be viable adjuncts to or in some cases replacements for ship-based oceanographic sampling. Gliders and ships acoustically sample the water column differently, with ships sampling all depths simultaneously in a single vertical pulse and gliders sampling shorter vertical segments of the water column in an up and down, sawtooth pattern. We simulated gliders following this flight pattern to sample the densities at depth of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), a patchily-distributed crustacean that is targeted by an international fishery. Krill densities from ship-based surveys conducted between 2001 to 2011 were treated as the “true” population densities sampled by the simulated gliders. Depth-integrated densities estimated from the glider sampling were compared to the population densities for each year. Coverage probabilities (the proportion of population means within a standard deviation of the glider sample means) for gliders diving to 150 m were near 100% in most years, better than the nominal 68%. Gliders diving to a maximum depth of 150 m estimated the annual population means better than gliders diving deeper because shallow dives provided more samples for a given length of trackline. Modeling the zero and non-zero data as separate distributions (the delta approach), an alternative to the lognormal CV approach used in this study, resulted in less accurate estimates of krill population densities. These results suggest that the sawtooth flight pattern of gliders can produce density estimates of krill comparable to the annual time series of density estimates from ship-based surveys. Gliders may also be useful to survey other patchily-distributed pelagic organisms.