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Over the last two decades, satellite tracking with the Argos system has become a widely used tool, enabling the movements of a large variety of terrestrial, aquatic and aerial vertebrates to be recorded (eg Weimerskirch et al. 1992; Gudmundsson et al. 1995; McConnell & Fedak 1996; Morreale et al. 1996; Block et al. 1998; Boyd 1999; Polovina et al. 2000). The system uses transmitters (termed platform terminal transmitters or PTTs) that periodically (typically at an interval of around 60 s) send a short (typically 360–920 ms) radio signal (401.650 mHz), termed an uplink, to polar-orbiting NOAA satellites. The location of the transmitter is then calculated from the Doppler shift in the frequency of transmissions received by a satellite as it approaches and then moves away from the transmitter on a single overpass, with each location being assigned a level of accuracy.

A frequent use of satellite tracking is to document long …