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Using Tracker to measure fish swimming speed in the wild

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Is it possible to measure fish swimming speed in the wild with Tracker?
Molly Scott
1 Posts

Hey everyone,
I am a PhD student studying fish swimming speeds. I only came across Tracker from a paper I read today and was hoping to get some information/advice about capabilities of Tracker.

Basically, I am looking for a method to estimate fish swimming speed in the wild in meters/second or bodylength/sec. I would like to use video to film individuals swimming for a certain amount of time (10s) and get estimations of distance and hence swimming speed-
1) Is this possible using Tracker?
2) Is tracker able to give estimates of fish size as well as speed?
3) And can Tracker estimate distance/swimming speed if the start frame and end frame are completely different, i.e. have no points of reference in terms of habitat for measuring distance? My fish species are apex predators who are quite fast swimmers.

Thanks in advance for your help.


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