News Release

Underwater photos show seabirds, seals and fish interacting with a tidal turbine in Washington State

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Observations of marine animal interactions with a small tidal turbine

image: 

Examples of seabirds. (a–c) Cormorants diving, swimming to the surface, and presumably foraging in the vicinity of the AMP. (d-f) Pigeon guillemots swimming, picking at the rotor, and interacting with the AMP.

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Credit: Cotter et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Underwater photos show seabirds, seals and fish interacting with a tidal turbine in Washington State

Article URL: https://plos.io/4jjG9cB

Video caption: A seal swims past while the turbine is stationary (video playback is at 25% speed).

Video credit: Cotter et al., CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Video link: https://plos.io/4j1tc71

Article title: Observations of marine animal interactions with a small tidal turbine

Author countries: U.S.

Funding: The development and deployment of the Turbine Lander was sponsored by the Naval Facilities Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center (NAVFAC) under Naval Sea Systems Command contract N00024-20-F8708. Environmental monitoring data management was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) TEAMER program, and analysis of the collected data was funded by WPTO (award EE0007827). Development of the machine learning and data management tools used by MarineSitu for this work was supported by WPTO through the Small Business Innovation and Research project “Modular Instrumentation and Automated Data Processing for Marine Energy Monitoring” (Award DE-SC0021845). The funder provided support in the form of salaries for all authors, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.


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