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When you’re a small crew on a sailboat, every piece of gear needs to pull its weight. That’s why we look for tools that are not only durable and efficient but also user-friendly. Our goal is simple: maximize impact with minimal resources. Because you don’t need a massive research vessel to contribute to ocean science—the more people asking questions and collecting data, the better we can understand, protect, and restore our oceans.
One of our latest tools, the In-Situ Aqua Troll 800, is a game-changer, but getting it aboard the S/Y ODISEA was quite the adventure. Picture trying to explain to customs agents that the bazooka-shaped device in your bag is, in fact, a water quality probe. After several airport detours, it finally made its way onboard, and let’s just say, well it’s been worth every checkpoint.
Diagnosing the Health of Our Oceans
Like diagnosing a patient, understanding the health of an ecosystem requires data, and lots of it. Oceans are complex, and for immobile species like corals, seagrasses, and mangroves that can’t escape when things go south, water quality is often the first clue to what’s wrong, or right.
Thanks to innovations from Vu-Situ and OceanLabs Seychelles, we can now measure critical parameters like dissolved oxygen, pH, temperature, and nutrients directly in the field and get real-time data. This has sparked a wave of curiosity aboard The Odisea. Suddenly, we can investigate our observations deeper such as why one patch of seagrass teems with life while another is eerily quiet; or why the corals around one island thrive while nearby reefs are struggling to survive.
Data in Action
During our latest expedition to Seychelles’ remote outer atoll, Cosmoledo, Dr. Casey Beckwitt from University of Lancaster shared how transformative the In-Situ Aqua Troll has been for her research on how seabird populations influence nearby marine habitats:
“It was incredibly valuable to have water quality data from our sample sites in Cosmoledo. It’s helping us make sense of unexpected patterns in our results; like whether temperature or nutrients are playing a hidden role. These high-resolution measurements give us insights we rarely have the capacity to collect and will help us ask better, deeper questions in the future.”
When investigating a mangrove die-off on the same expedition, Emma Mederic from Island Conservation Society highlighted how this tool helped them go deeper, faster:
“This tool let us investigate way more factors without losing precious time to tidal changes. Even before lab samples were sent off, we could see huge differences in dissolved oxygen levels between the dead patches and healthy mangroves. That’s priceless when every hour counts.”
Next Steps: Continuous Monitoring at Sea
We’ve now taken it a step further, adding an underway system customized by OceanLabs Seychelles that continuously monitors the water quality right under the boat as we sail. On our next leg we will be able to live publish the water conditions to benefit global and local research initiatives-especially in hard to access places. We look forward to all that this new tool will bring not only to the expedition but the scientific community at large.
It’s About More Than Data
At the heart of it, this isn’t just about collecting numbers. It’s about empowering more people to ask the right questions, giving them the tools to find answers, and sharing those answers widely so we can create real, lasting solutions.
Ellen Myers
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