On the Cusp of Retirement, an Innovasea Icon Reflects on the Evolution of Fish Tracking

When Richard Vallee started his engineering career in the 1980s designing chips for cellular telephones in Calgary, he had no way of knowing his work would one day revolve around fish.

But over the years his professional journey has taken him from designing electronics for things as varied as soda machines and submarines to helping develop (and market and sell) Innovasea’s advanced acoustic telemetry technology for fish tracking.

Quick with a smile or a laugh, Richard is hanging up his slide rule at the end of the month after an impressive 35-year run with the company and its predecessors, most recently as vice president of sales.

“Richard has worn many hats with Innovasea and has left an indelible mark on the fish tracking organization,” said Innovasea President Mark Jollymore. “He’s widely respected in the research community and we’re going to miss his intelligence, work ethic and – perhaps most important – his friendliness and sense of humor.”

We sat down with Richard in late November to look back at his career. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation that picks up his story as he’s moving from engineering into more of a sales role at Amirix Systems, a predecessor to Innovasea.

Tell me about your transition to sales. Did that come naturally for you?

As I grew my engineering career from being a designer to a project manager and then to a project manager on larger projects, I began engaging more with the customers. And I had a talent for being able to simplify some complicated things that we would be working on. I could speak to customers in a language that they understood. So as the sales team would engage with new opportunities, they kept coming to me because I could quickly sort of synthesize what the customer was trying to accomplish and then say, “Oh yeah, we can do that.” And it just evolved from there.

Richard Vallee, right, shows off some cutting edge technology from yesteryear.

Your work was also shifting from things like parking meters and military defense systems to animals and biology. What was that like?

Even in high school biology was not anything I was remotely interested in. I was more into the chemistry and the physics courses, you know? And then all of a sudden, here I am working with fish. And other than fishing growing up, I didn’t know anything about fish other than they swam around. So this was all fascinating new stuff. Every sale was yet another story about “This is what we want to do, and this is how we’re want to do it. What do you guys think?” And so we got into this role of where we were providing advice and consultation on how to conduct fishery studies using advanced technology. So it was a good marriage of biologists and engineers kind of working together to solve a problem.

Was it difficult shifting your focus from machines to living, breathing entities?  

It was definitely a very steep learning curve thinking about habitat and habitat use and being able to explore all of these questions that researchers wanted to answer. Initially all these studies were based on presence/absence. You know, the fish is there or he’s not. He’s within range of the receiver or he’s not. I mean, that’s all we could tell. And then you could see they wanted to know more and they wanted to be able to position the animal. So we used our engineering talents to come up with this fine scale positioning system that was basically being able to say, “Well, if we could hear that tag on three or more receivers, we can actually triangulate and get to within meters of where the fish is” as opposed to “Well, he’s within a few hundred meters of this receiver because we heard him.” And so that was a whole new revelation and skill set that came about by understanding the needs of researchers so we could refine what we had to do to better satisfy their study goals and objectives.

So the innovation and evolution of the technology came from the wish lists of researchers? 

Yes, it was basically getting the end users to tell us what they wanted. What is the gap in the technology? What can’t you answer? What do you need?  And a lot of times it revolved around sensors. “Well, I don’t know what depth the fish are at. Can’t you put a pressure sensor on?” Yeah, we can put a pressure sensor in there. So we would develop technologies and develop innovative solutions based on the customer’s needs. So our accelerometer tag, for example, the main motivation for that was actually an oil and gas project where they were going out doing seismic tests and they were wondering how many fish are being killed every time they go out and do seismic tests because of the sound that they’re putting into the water. So we decided that the best thing to do is put an accelerometer tag in a fish to figure out if the fish is actually swimming around or if it’s basically lying on the bottom dead. If the transmitter is just pinging, you don’t know the difference. So by developing an accelerometer tag, we were able to give them tags that could satisfy the needs of that research. But then it gave us a whole new product and opened up all kinds of new doors. Other people saw that and said, “Hey, I could use that for this, that and the other thing.” So, yeah, that’s how these things often evolve based on customer need.

Richard at a trade show pre-COVID.

You’ve now been exclusively in the fish tracking realm for 15 years – nearly half your career. What’s been the biggest change you’ve seen during that time?

The biggest one, I would say, has been seeing the evolution of the adoption of the fish tracking technology. In the early days I would go to conferences and hear the conversations between the trackers and the non-trackers and the other biologists. The trackers were a very small subset and they were putting in these listening stations and getting all of this data. And the biologists would say, “Well, it’s data rich, but it’s information poor.” It wasn’t until we were able to do presence/absence studies on large migratory species that it started to gain some traction. Who knew an animal swam from, say, Alaska to California? Nobody knew. Well, we actually tracked one and he did it. And once we gave them the fine scale positioning capability they could look at habitat use and spawning and different behaviors. You know, “Oh, they feed here, they reproduce there,” all that stuff. Entire ecosystems could now be teased out and analyzed it in a much greater detail. And then the biologists all started saying, “Oh, wait a minute, this is a powerful tool. This is really useful.” Add to this the ability to monitor and factor in environmental cues like temperature, dissolved oxygen and salinity, and now you are getting a more complete picture of fish ecosystems. And that’s what sort of brought on the advent of things like the Ocean Tracking Network and all these other fish tracking networks. All of a sudden the biologists said, “Hey, if we all start sharing this data, we can produce these incredibly large data sets – and just imagine the information we can glean.” So it was witnessing that greater acceptance of the technology and broader understanding of what it could do.

Where do you think acoustic telemetry is headed in the years and decades ahead?

I think a lot of people are just waking up to it. There hasn’t been a lot of people interested in this space or paying much attention to it. But now more people want to track more things in the ocean, and acoustics is the way to do it. So there’s still tremendous growth to be seen, especially with the stories we hear about tracking plastics in the ocean and tracking all kinds of things underwater. Because humans, as a species, are encroaching more and more in the oceans – not only for food but also probably for minerals and industrial reasons. And as we start to – who knows? – build cities below the surface of the water or whatnot, well you can’t use light. You can’t use radio waves. They don’t propagate. You’ve got to use acoustics. So I think there are probably all kinds of new things that are going to happen beyond where we are today, all of them linked to the Internet of Things. It’ll be like putting the internet underwater in a sense. So what are the possibilities? They’re pretty endless. And they can get into a myriad of sectors, whether it be oil and gas and mining or fisheries and aquaculture. These are just there’s lots of spaces yet to be to be explored.”

Any final thoughts as you prepare to wind things down here?  

The future is bright for fish tracking and I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to make my mark, so to speak, with the organization and help with the business processes and the customers. The thing I know I’m going to miss is going out to meet with customers and talking with them. I’ve had a few calls today working through some projects and doing some planning and those are the fun things, you know? Obviously you’ve got to do quotes and business and get money and all that, but it’s just the problem-solving aspects are the things that certainly will be missed.