The Secret Lives of Animals: How Technology is Uncovering Their Hidden World

Saturday - February 24 2024, 03:45 UTC - 9 months ago

Technology is helping researchers uncover new insights into the lives of animals, from tracking sharks in the Bahamas to monitoring small songbirds around the world. With affordable and lightweight GPS sensors, scientists hope to create a big-data system for animal movement that could contribute to understanding and protecting our planet.

There was something strange about the way the sharks were moving between the islands of the Bahamas. Tiger sharks tend to hug the shoreline, explains marine biologist Austin Gallagher, but when he began tagging the 1,000-pound animals with satellite transmitters in 2016, he discovered that these predators turned away from it, toward two ancient underwater hills made of sand and coral fragments that stretch out 300 miles toward Cuba. They were spending a lot of time "crisscrossing, making highly tortuous, convoluted movements" to be near them, Gallagher says.

It wasn’t immediately clear what attracted sharks to the area: while satellite images clearly showed the subsea terrain, they didn’t pick up anything out of the ordinary. It was only when Gallagher and his colleagues attached 360-degree cameras to the animals that they were able to confirm what they were so drawn to: vast, previously unseen seagrass meadows—a biodiverse habitat that offered a smorgasbord of prey.

Animals have long been able to offer unique insights about the natural world around us, acting as organic sensors picking up phenomena that remain invisible to humans. More than 100 years ago, leeches signaled storms ahead by slithering out of the water; canaries warned of looming catastrophe in coal mines until the 1980s; and mollusks that close when exposed to toxic substances are still used to trigger alarms in municipal water systems in Minneapolis and Poland.

Attaching 360-degree cameras to tiger sharks helped demystify the animals’ strange movements around the Bahamas.COURTESY OF BENEATH THE WAVES .

These days, we have more insight into animal behavior than ever before thanks to sensor tags, which have helped researchers answer key questions about globe-spanning migrations and the sometimes hard-to-reach places animals visit along the way. In turn, tagged animals have increasingly become partners in scientific discovery and planetary monitoring.But the data we gather from these animals still adds up to only a relatively narrow slice of the whole picture. Results are often confined to silos, and for many years tags were big and expensive, suitable only for a handful of animal species—like tiger sharks—that are powerful (or large) enough to transport them.

This is beginning to change. Researchers are asking: What will we find if we follow even the smallest animals? What if we could monitor a sample of all the world’s wildlife to see how different species’ lives intersect? What could we learn from a big-data system of animal movement, continuously monitoring how creatures big and small adapt to the world around us? It may be, some researchers believe, a vital tool in the effort to save our increasingly crisis-plagued planet.

Wearables for the wild .

Just a few years ago, a project called ICARUS seemed ready to start answering the big questions about animal movement. A team led by Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in southern Germany and a pioneer in the field, launched a new generation of affordable and lightweight GPS sensors that could be worn by animals as small as songbirds, fish, and rodents. The technology was a game changer, Wikelski says. "We somewhat stunned the world because we showed that we could build this device for much less money than the common market cost. So much less money that it made it feasible to actually think of putting it on small animals that you really study the behavior of." .