Bay of Arcachon, France.
This is a dive on a biomonitoring set-up focusing on coastal water quality.
The ability of any bivalve mollusc to ‘taste’ its environment all day long opened the way for monitoring the quality of our coastal waters. Monitoring permanently their natural opening/closing activity is a way to put a ‘thermometer’ in our waters and read, throughout the year, 24/7, the health of both the recorded bivalves and their environment.
We are a group of scientists (biologists, electronics engineer, mathematicians) who work at developing the basic knowledge necessary to have a robust and reliable technology in that field, working for years without in-situ human intervention. Using internet and mobile telephone networks, we can sit at our desks and continuously survey and record the behavior - and welfare - of animals on the other end of the Earth. We developed a website to share our observations. To know more about what we are doing, simply google: molluscan eye. This video presents our historical site, which started to emit on a daily basis on February 9th, 2006 in the Bay of Arcachon, France.
Research team in Arcachon: Jean-Charles Massabuau (team leader), Damien Tran, Pierre Ciret, Mohamedou Sow. Scientific divers: Stéphane Bujan & Benoit Gouillieux. Cameramen: Benoit Gouilleux.
UMR CNRS 5805 EPOC. Université de Bordeaux & CNRS