ASL Adds Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler (AZFP)-Nano to Its Instrument Suite

10 January 2025

AZFP-Nano. (Image credit: ASL)

ASL has added the Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler (AZFP)-nano to its family of advanced acoustic instruments for aquatic environments. This compact, lightweight, single-frequency scientific echosounder is a miniaturized version of the AZFP and is well-suited for applications in challenging environments where size and weight are important considerations. This advanced profiler was developed to measure a wide range of physical and biological parameters, including zooplankton, fish, algae, bubbles, and suspended sediments within the water column. The AZFP-nano has useful applications for fisheries sciences, oceanography, and environmental monitoring, and due to its compact design, the AZFP-nano can easily fit on AUVs, CTD rosette samplers, and other instrument packages.

The unit uses nine common D-sized batteries with enough power for multi-week deployments. The instrument comes factory-calibrated with a 200 kHz transducer, with other transducers soon to be added. In the summer of 2024, the AZFP-nano was part of an International climate research expedition off the southeast coast of Greenland, where it was used to collect 14 kilometers of water column data in a study focused on glacial-ocean interactions.