Locmariaquer France

       In collaboration with the Laboratory of Mathematic and Applied Mathematics (LMAM), University of Southern Britanny (UBS) at Vannes, France, we launched a new HFNI Valvometer at the entrance of the Gulf of Morbihan in early March 2011. The goal is to study there the behavior and ethology of Pacific oysters Crassostrea gigas in the intertidal area.

      The framework is a pluridisciplinar and  transversal programme directed by Prof. Gilles Durrieu (ASPEET).
       Gilles Durrieu was formerly at the UMR 5805 EPOC, Bordeaux University, were he was Assistant Professor from 1999 - 2010. He was a member of the team who developed the HFNI Valvometry at the Marine Biological Station at Arcachon, France. He was in charge of the mathematical developments and the data handling.

         A major goal of the MolluSCAN Eye project is to improve our knowledge of the molluscan bivalve ethology (oysters at Locamariaquer, Brittany, France) and to use it as a possible way to monitor the quality of our coastal waters. On a given site, to characterize the behavior of a group of 16 animals, every 0.1 sec we sample a triplet of informations  (an opening status, a sampling time, an animal number) that is about 2.6 millions of data/day and about 1 billion/year. It is clear that the mathematical analysis plays here a fundamental role, the problems are both theoritical and applied.

The system is in the intertidal area, it is only emersed at low tide. The electronic is in the tube and the oysters in the bag (on the left).

        All the electronic component (specifically developed by the MolluSCAN Eye team and the SME EUKREA Electromatic at Pessac, Gironde) is located in the grey tube. At low tide, the system connects itself to the local mobile network, then to the Marine Biological Station at Arcachon, France, where the data are handled. Analyses are performed on a workstation running with two dual-core Xeon processors. The data are then shown graphically for easy reading on the web.

        Implementation. A warm thanks to the city of Locmariaquer and its mayor as well as to Pierre Louvard, harbour master's office, for their welcome and their receptiveness (http://www.ot-locmariaquer.com/). More than 250 m of cables were fixed on the rocks and under the sand by various colleagues from the UBS. From left to right: Prof. Gilles Durrieu, Prof. Ion Grama and Dr. Jean-Marie Tricot at work, far from their equations and computers but obviously happy to be there!