Hands free surgery photography system for high volume tagging studies

Double tagging procedures of Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System (JSATS) Acoustic Micro-Transmitters (AMT) and Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tags require quick and careful handling of fish. Photographing fish during the tagging and suturing process provides valuable biological state data for researchers to validate statistical assumptions of survival estimates. The addition of photography to large-scale tagging operations can increase fishes’ exposure time under anesthesia. Furthermore, photographing surgeries can increase the surgeon’s interactivity with computer and photography hardware posing risks of damaging expensive equipment. We have developed an inexpensive novel photography system that minimizes fish retention times requiring no physical human interaction with computer and photography hardware. This system uses a web camera to monitor virtual buttons that when partially occluded by a finger will trigger a digital SLR to capture a high resolution image. The process of photographing a fish can be performed in less than ten seconds and requires only one surgeon. Moreover, this system catalogues high-resolution images to allow for post-processing, while automatically maintaining meta-data about each fish, e.g. tag id, date, and time.