Surfing NASA’s Internet of Animals: Satellites Study Ocean Wildlife
July 13th, 2024
Via Terra Daily, a look at the use of satellites to study wildlife: Anchoring the boat in a sandbar, research scientist Morgan Gilmour steps into the shallows and is immediately surrounded by sharks. The warm waters around the tropical island act as a reef shark nursery, and these baby biters are curious about the newcomer. […]
Read More »‘Find My Friends for Rhinos’: How High-Tech Tracking is Keeping Tabs on Wildlife
May 21st, 2024
Via CNN, a look at how, in Northern Kenya’s Sera Conservancy, veterinarians have been using a conservation technology tool called EarthRanger to track and monitor wildlife:
It’s early morning in Sera Community Conservancy in Northern Kenya and sunlight beats down across this expansive semi-arid landscape. Birds calling and boots crunching are the only sounds for miles as a team led by Kenyan wildlife veterinarian Dr. Mukami Ruoro-Oundo carefully tracks white rhinos — the first of their kind to be found here in Samburu County.
Once common in the area, by the early 1990s Northern Kenya’s rhino population was decimated by poaching. But the country’s black rhino population has more than doubled since 1989, and by December 2022 there were 1,900 black rhinos and white rhinos in total, according to Kenya Wildlife Services.
Sera Conservancy has championed the country’s community-led rhino conservation efforts. In 2015 it established East Africa’s first community rhino sanctuary with the introduction of 10 critically endangered black rhinos. Today, that number has grown to 21 black rhinos which freely roam across 107 square kilometers (41 square miles) of designated sanctuary land, and in February 2024, they were joined by four white rhinos from the nearby Lewa Conservancy.
As she searches on foot, Dr. Ruoro-Oundo spots two of the female white rhinos. One, called Sarah, looks heavily pregnant but as the vet creeps closer she notices something is very wrong.
Mindful of not encroaching too long on the rhinos’ territory and reluctant to intervene unnecessarily, she opts for a different approach; through a conservation technology tool called EarthRanger she can monitor Sarah’s movements in real time from a distance.
Prior to translocation, each of the four white rhinos was fitted with a GPS tag in its horns and ears, which sends a real-time location to remote devices like mobile phones, or to the conservancy’s operations center, where Dr. Ruoro-Oundo is able to monitor Sarah’s location and movements.
As EarthRanger’s co-founder Jake Wall tells CNN, “It’s exactly like a ‘Find my Friends’ for rhino.”
Sparse internet connectivity means Dr. Ruoro-Oundo cannot get a clear signal from Sarah’s transmitter but thankfully Sarah is not alone; a female rhino named Arot has never left her side and through Arot’s transmitter Dr. Ruoro-Oundo can see that Sarah has barely moved in hours, suggesting her condition is deteriorating. By using a drone to take photos of her, the team is able to confirm that Sarah urgently needs help.
“We noticed she has a fecal impaction, it was quite huge and had made the rectal and vulvar area swollen,” says Dr. Ruoro-Oundo. “She’s in a lot of pain because she could not put down her tail, and you could see she was a bit sluggish, she really wanted to spend her time lying down. So in such a case we really need to intervene for her comfort, to relieve her of the distress and the pain.”
An emergency intervention is immediately put into action, led by Kenya Wildlife Services and Sera Conservancy’s management and rangers. Air, ground and additional veterinary support are mobilized within hours — potentially saving not only Sarah’s life but that of her unborn calf too.
For Dr. Ruoro-Oundo, the key to safeguarding Kenya’s wildlife is a balance between community and technology.
“I think you cannot separate technology from conservation in the future,” she says.” The human element can never be removed, but technology will always come to assist where we cannot reach.”
A global effort
Now used in 70 countries, EarthRanger’s story started in Kenya when co-founder Wall was researching elephants there.
“In about 2012, we had a real crisis with poaching in Kenya, so we wanted a way that we could pick up on elephants that were getting killed, and the sign for us was that the collar stopped moving for more than about five or six hours, which is the longest sort of period that an elephant rests for,” he recalls.
“So I wrote the algorithm that could work out whether an elephant had stopped moving or not, and then (the collar) would send an SMS if it had. So that was kind of the beginning.”
He adds that the system has evolved quite significantly since then, and Sarah is one of 9,000 animals — including elephants, lions, giraffe, tortoises, sea turtles and 1,200 rhinos — that EarthRanger is currently tracking in Kenya alone.
Wall says the system can integrate data from more than 100 different devices — “anything from elephant trackers to ear tags for rhino, to collars for lions, tail tags (for giraffes), devices that glue onto the shell of a turtle.”
It can also receive information from sources such as vehicle trackers, satellites, and remote sensing alerts for things like deforestation and fire. “It’s pulling it all into one platform, where it can be readily visualized, analyzed and then acted upon,” Wall adds. “And all of that’s giving the operators and managers a bird’s eye view of the situation as it’s happening, with real-time tools.”
According to the EarthRanger, all of these devices are designed to be lightweight, durable and inconspicuous ensuring they don’t impact on the animals’ natural behavior or cause them discomfort. For rhinos, Dr. Ruoro-Oundo says that attaching a tracker is the equivalent sensation of a human getting their ears pierced.
Samuel Lekimaroro, a wildlife protection manager for the Northern Rangelands Trust, which includes Sera Conservancy, uses this kind of data to live-track terrestrial and marine wildlife across 6.5 million hectares. For Lekimaroro it has become a powerful tool in translocating wildlife, data collection and security operations, including identifying hotspots for human-wildlife conflict.
“Thanks to EarthRanger, trophy poaching has been on a steady decline for the last five years, from a high of 120 elephants poached in 2012, to zero in the last four years in (our) member conservancies,” he says.
Wall says its potential to securely collect and share data from different EarthRanger sites from across the world is revolutionary.
“If organizations are doing, say, joint patrolling, or monitoring of a species, then they can also share that information,” he says. “By storing information on EarthRanger we can pull that data from different sites and combine it in ways that was never possible before. So it’s really enabling the analysis and the reporting in a way that just never existed before.”
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Read More »The Algorithmic Ocean: How AI Is Revolutionizing Marine Conservation
April 26th, 2024
Via MIT Press Reader, a look at how AI is revolutionizing the effort to combat illegal fishing:
Dyhia Belhabib’s journey to becoming a marine scientist began with war funerals on TV. Her hometown, on the pine-forested slopes of the Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria, lies only 60 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. But a trip to the beach was dangerous. A bitter civil war raged across the mountains as she was growing up in the 1990s; the conflict was particularly brutal for Belhabib’s people, the Berbers, one of the Indigenous peoples of North Africa. As she puts it: “We didn’t go to the ocean much, because you could get killed on the way there.”
The ocean surfaced in her life in another way, on state-run television. When an important person was assassinated or a massacre occurred, broadcasters would interrupt regular programming to show a sober documentary. They frequently chose a Jacques Cousteau film, judged sufficiently dignified and neutral to commemorate the deaths. Whenever she saw the ocean on television, Belhabib would wonder who had died. “My generation thinks of tragedies when we see the ocean,” she says. “I didn’t grow to love it in my youth.”
By the time she was ready for university, the civil war had ended. The Islamists had lost the war, but their cultural influence had grown. Engaged at 13 to a fiancé who wanted her to become a banker, Belhabib chafed at the restrictions. Her given name, Dyhia, refers to a Berber warrior queen who successfully fought off invading Arab armies over a thousand years ago; Queen Kahina, as she is also known, remains a symbol of female empowerment, an inspiration for Berbers and for the thousands of Algerian women who took up arms in the war of independence. In a society where one in four women cannot read, Belhabib realized she didn’t want to go to university only to spend her life “counting other people’s money.”
Preview thumbnail for ‘Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth
Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth
This riveting book explores the promise and pitfalls the Digital Age holds for the future of our planet.One day, her brother’s friend visited their house. He was a student in marine sciences in the capital city, Algiers. When he described traveling out to sea, Belhabib felt a calling for an entirely unexpected path. “It was,” she recalls, “a career I had never heard of, and one that challenged every stereotype of women in Algerian society.” Soon after the visit, she moved to Algiers to study at the National Institute of Marine Sciences and Coastal Management, where she was one of the only women in her program. She also broke off the engagement with her fiancé, so that she could focus full-time on studies. She still vividly remembers her feelings of freedom, fear and unreality on her first trip out to sea. While other students dove for samples, she floated on top of the water, trying to survive. “I never learned how to swim, and I still don’t know how,” she admits.
Belhabib graduated at the top of her class but was repeatedly rejected when she applied to universities overseas. Her luck turned when she met Daniel Pauly, one of the world’s most famous fish scientists, at a conference. Unintimidated by the fact that Pauly had just won the Volvo Prize—the environmental equivalent of a Nobel—she introduced herself and told him she wanted to study with his team. Although she did not yet speak fluent English, Pauly accepted her as a student. When she began her doctoral research, over 90 percent of the world’s wild fisheries had been eradicated, and Pauly was sounding the alarm about a new, global surge in illegal fishing that was decimating marine food webs and depriving coastal communities of livelihoods. He wanted her to work on Africa, where illegal fishing had reached epidemic proportions.
Belhabib spent the next few years in West Africa. When her research uncovered the extent of illegal fishing to feed Chinese and European markets, she made the front page of the New York Times. “Being African myself, I was able to bring people together to openly share data in a way they never had before,” she explains. It’s not hard to imagine her corralling government officials: Disarmingly frank and engagingly energetic, the whip-smart, hijab-wearing Belhabib stands a little over five feet tall and talks a mile a minute, with a self-deprecating laugh and a talent for gently posed, bitingly direct questions.
Her startling findings touched a nerve. Tens of thousands of boats commit fishing crimes every year, but no global repository of fishing crimes exists. A fishing vessel will often commit a crime in one jurisdiction, pay a meager fine, and sail off to another jurisdiction, thus operating with impunity. If a global database of fishing vessel criminal records could be created, Belhabib realized, there would be nowhere left to hide. She suggested the idea to a variety of international organizations, but the issue was a political hot potato; national sovereignty, they argued, prevented them from tracking international criminals. Undeterred, Belhabib decided to build the database herself. Late at night, while her infant son was sleeping, she began combing through government reports and news articles in dozens of languages (she speaks several fluently). Her database grew, word spread and her network of informants—often government officials frustrated with international inaction on illegal fishing—began expanding. She moved to a small nonprofit and began advising Interpol and national governments. The database, christened Spyglass, grew into the world’s largest registry of the criminal history of industrial fishing vessels and their corporate backers. But the registry, Belhabib knew, was useful only if the information made its way into the right hands. So in 2021 she co-founded Nautical Crime Investigation Services, a startup that uses artificial intelligence and customized monitoring technology to enable more effective policing of marine crimes and criminal vessels at sea. Together with her co-founder Sogol Ghattan, who has a background in ethical A.I., she named their core algorithm ADA, in homage to Ada Lovelace—the woman who wrote the world’s first computer program.
Belhabib is attempting to tackle one of the most intractable problems in contemporary environmental conservation: illegal fishing. Across the oceans, the difficulty of tracking ships creates ideal cover for some of the world’s largest environmental crimes. After the end of World War II, the world’s fishing fleets rapidly industrialized. Wartime technologies that had been developed for detecting underwater submarines were repurposed for spotting fish. The size of nets grew exponentially, and offshore factory ships were outfitted so they could spend months at sea, extending the reach of industrial fishing into the furthest reaches of the ocean. As the world’s population grew, fish protein became an increasingly important source of food. But warning signs soon appeared: crashes in key fish populations, an alarming trend of “fishing down marine food webs,” and a series of cascading impacts that rapidly depleted marine ecosystems.
In the wake of depleting stocks, fishers should have responded by reducing their take. Instead, they redoubled their efforts. After the world’s leading fishing nations—China and Europe are the largest markets—overfished their own waters, they began exporting industrial overfishing to the global oceans. China’s offshore fishing fleet of several hundred thousand vessels, which received nearly $8 billion in government subsidies in 2018, is now the largest in the world.
Governments of wealthier nations subsidized massive fleets of corporate-backed vessels to fish the high seas, using bottom trawling and drift nets stretching for dozens of miles, killing everything in their path. Artisanal fishers were squeezed out, and as fish stocks collapsed, rising food insecurity generated protests and political unrest. In West Africa, for example, fishing boats from the world’s wealthiest nations have depleted local fisheries to such an extent that waves of migrants—faced with food insecurity and uncertain futures—have begun fleeing their homes in a desperate, risky attempt to reach European outposts such as the Spanish Canary Islands; thousands of migrants have died at sea. The smaller fishing fleet, meanwhile, has struggled to remain solvent; impoverished fishers are increasingly vulnerable targets for criminal organizations seeking mules for hire to transport drugs, or boats to serve as cover operations for human trafficking.
Over 90 percent of the world’s fish stocks are now fished to capacity or overfished. Despite this, scientists’ calls for reduced fishing have largely fallen on deaf ears. Conventional attempts to manage fisheries are stymied by the limits of logbooks and onboard human observers, and local electronic monitoring systems. Fishing boats that exceed quotas or fish in off-limits areas are rarely caught, operating with impunity in front of local fishermen’s eyes; and even if caught, they are even more rarely punished.
Marine panopticon
The world’s oceans are experiencing an onslaught: As fish have become scarcer, illegal fishing has surged. Rather than merely document the decline of fish stock, Belhabib decided to do something about it. Her solution: to combine ADA, her A.I.-powered database of marine crimes, with data that tracks vessel movements in real time. She began by tracking signals from the marine traffic transponders carried by oceangoing ships—also known as automatic information systems (AIS). AIS signals are detected by land transceivers or satellites and used to track and monitor individual vessel movements around the world. AIS signals are also detected by other ships in the vicinity, reducing the potential for ship collisions. Belhabib and her team then built an A.I.-powered risk assessment tool called GRACE (in honor of the pioneering coder Grace Hopper), which predicts risks of environmental crimes at sea. When combined with vessel detection devices such as AIS, GRACE provides real-time information on the likelihood of a particular ship committing environmental crimes, which can be used by enforcement agencies to catch the criminals in the act. Belhabib’s database means that criminal vessels—which often engage in multiple forms of crime, including human trafficking and drug smuggling, as well as illegal fishing—now find it much harder to hide.The high seas are one of the world’s last global commons, largely unregulated. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provides little protection for the high seas, two-thirds of the ocean’s surface. The adoption of a new U.N. treaty on the high seas in 2023 will create more protection, but this will require years to be implemented. Even within 200 nautical miles of the coast, where national authorities have legal jurisdiction, most struggle to monitor the oceans beyond the areas a few miles from the coast. And beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit, no one effectively governs the open ocean.
So Belhabib hands her data on human rights and labor abuses over to Global Fishing Watch, a not-for-profit organization that collaborates with the national coast guards and Interpol to target vessels suspected of illegal fishing for boarding, apprehend rogue fishing vessels and police the boundaries of marine parks. The observatory visualizes, tracks and shares data about global fishing activity in near real time and for free; launched at the 2016 U.S. State Department’s “Our Ocean” conference in Washington, it is backed by some of the world’s largest foundations. Its partners include Google (which provides tools for processing big data), the marine conservation organization Oceana and SkyTruth—a not-for-profit that uses satellite imagery to advance environmental protection.
Global Fishing Watch uses satellite data on boat location, combined with Belhabib’s data on criminal activity, to train artificial intelligence algorithms to identify vessel types, fishing activity patterns and even specific gear types (tasks that would require human fisheries experts hundreds of years to complete). The tracking system pinpoints each individual fishing vessel with laser-like accuracy, predicts whether it is actually fishing and even identifies what type of fishing is underway. Its reports have revealed that half of the global ocean is actively fished, much of it covertly.
Fred Abrahams, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, explains that this approach is just one example of a new generation of conservation technology that could act as a check on anyone engaged in resource exploitation. His team at Human Rights Watch uses satellite imagery to track everything from illegal mining to undercover logging operations. As Abrahams tells the New York Times: “This is why we are so committed to these technologies … they make it that much harder to hide large-scale abuses.” Abrahams, like other advocates, is confident that the glitches—for example, AIS tags are not yet carried by all fishing vessels globally, poor reception makes coverage in some regions challenging, and some boats turn off the AIS when they want to go into stealth mode—will eventually be solved. Researchers have recently figured out, for example, how to use satellites to triangulate the position of fishing boats in stealth mode—enabling tracking of so-called dark fleets. These results can inform a new era of independent oversight of illegal fishing and transboundary fisheries. Meanwhile, researchers are developing other applications for AIS data, including assessments of the contribution of ship exhaust emissions to global air pollution, the exposure of marine species to shipping noise, and the extent of forced labor—often hidden, and linked to human trafficking—on the world’s fishing fleets.
It’s a herculean task for one organization to police the world’s oceans. And Global Fishing Watch’s data is mostly retroactive; by the time the data is analyzed and the authorities have arrived, fishing vessels have often left the scene. What is still lacking is a method for marine criminals to be more effectively tracked in real time, and apprehended locally. This is where Belhabib’s next venture comes in. She is now working with local governments in Africa—where much illegal fishing is concentrated—to provide them with trackers and A.I.-powered technologies to catch illegal fishing and other maritime crimes in the act. As she notes: “When you ask the Guinean Navy how much of their territorial waters they can actually monitor, it’s only a fraction of a vast area. They simply don’t have the resources.” Belhabib’s system pinpoints vessels that may be committing infractions and assesses the risk live on screen. This allows local security forces and other agencies such as Interpol to more easily find illegal fishers, while reducing the costs of deployment, monitoring and interdiction.
She cautions, however, about the use of similar digital technologies to track illegal migration. The European Union, for example, has strengthened its “digital frontier” through satellite monitoring, unmanned drones and remotely piloted aircraft, in some cases relying on private security and defense companies to undertake data analytics and tracking. But these technologies are often focused on surveillance rather than search and rescue of migrants stranded at sea. As Belhabib relates: “Recently I spoke with the Spanish Navy, and they told me they watched over 100 people die when a boat full of migrants capsized and they could only save a few people. They told me, ‘We take their fish away, they risk their lives to have a better and decent life.’ It’s heartbreaking and avoidable.” In Belhabib’s view, Digital Earth technologies, as tools such as hers are known, should prioritize ecological and humanitarian goals, rather than surveillance and profit.
Digital Earth technologies enable more rapid detection and, in some cases, prediction of marine crimes. Digital monitoring, combined with artificial intelligence, allows precise analysis of fishing vessel locations and movements at a global scale. Although this does not guarantee enforcement, it could enable more efficient policing of the world’s oceans. The use of digital technologies enables conservationists to tackle two common flaws that lead to failures in environmental enforcement. First: Data is scarce; if available, there is often a time lag, geographical gaps or data biases. This makes evidence-gathering difficult or impossible. Second, enforcement often comes too late. Environmental criminals can be prosecuted, but legal victories are uncertain, and they happen after the damage has been done. These shortcomings of contemporary environmental governance—sparse data; unenforceable regulations; and patchy, sporadic enforcement that punishes but fails to prevent environmental harm—can be overcome by digital monitoring, which mobilizes abundant data in real time to gather systematic evidence and enable timely enforcement.
These techniques appear to be achieving some success. In Ghana, for example, there has been a long-standing conflict between industrial fishing boats and small-scale, artisanal fishers using canoes and small boats to fish near the shore. Satellite data has helped the government’s Fisheries Enforcement Unit track and reduce the incursions of larger fishing boats into near-shore waters. In Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago country with the second-longest coastline in the world, the government has entered into an agreement with Global Fishing Watch data to monitor fisheries and share the data about vessels’ movements publicly online, a major step forward in transparency in fisheries enforcement. The Indonesian partnership is an example of the longer-term aim of Global Fishing Watch: to share its geospatial data sets and online mapping platform with governments around the world.
Despite these recent gains to combat illegal fishing, digital tech is also exacerbating the underlying problem, as fishers themselves have started taking advantage of digital strategies. One example is the growing use of fish aggregating devices, which use acoustic technology, combined with satellite-linked global positioning systems, to better spot schools of fish. Fishers can effectively assess location, biomass and even species, allowing them to aggregate and fish more efficiently. Digitization is ratcheting up the already intensely competitive fishing industry and accelerating the overfishing of endangered species.
Even if conservationists can win this digital arms race, there is a more fundamental problem: The underlying structural drivers of overfishing—consumer demand, particularly in Asia and Europe, and a lack of adequate governance for the high seas—are not solvable by digital technologies alone. Governance reform and digital innovation must work in tandem. For example, in the absence of government regulation, digital monitoring of fishing on the open ocean would be unlikely to scale up. But the adoption of the new U.N. treaty on the high seas in 2023 included a significant commitment to creating new Marine Protected Areas, aligned with the Global Biodiversity Convention’s commitment to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030.
These new developments create an impetus for digital monitoring; and, in turn, digital monitoring will increase the likelihood that Marine Protected Areas will be effective at protecting fish populations. This illustrates two key points about environmental governance in the 21st century: the interplay between digital and governance innovation, and the fact that planetary governance of the environment is possible only with planetary-scale computation.
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Read More »Saving The Whales, With Technology
April 12th, 2024
Via The Economist, a look at how new technology can keep whales safe from speeding ships:
On march 3rd a whale calf washed ashore in Georgia, on America’s east coast, bearing slash marks characteristic of a ship’s propeller. Less than a month later another whale, a recent mother, was found floating off the coast of Virginia. Her back was broken from the blunt-force trauma of a ship collision; her calf, missing and still meant to be nursing, is not expected to live. Three deaths within weeks is not good news for the North Atlantic right whales, of which only about 360 remain.
They are dying mainly because of human activity, and they are not alone. Ship collisions threaten whale populations worldwide, killing up to 20,000 individuals annually. With global ocean traffic forecast to rise by at least 240% by 2050, the problem will balloon. But a new movement is using technology to fight back. On April 11th a Californian strike-prevention programme expanded operations across North American waters. Other countries are following suit.
Whale Safe launched in 2020, two years after the number of whales killed by collisions in California reached a record high of 14. Callie Leiphardt, the scientist leading the project at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, says that for every killed whale found, ten more are thought to die unrecorded. That so many were dying despite voluntary speed limits suggested more robust interventions were needed. The team reasoned that by alerting ships to whales, and publicising which shipping companies ignored the speed limit, they might increase compliance and bring down deaths.
Their approach rests on listening for whales underwater using microphone-equipped buoys capable of separating low-frequency whale calls from the ocean’s background noise. Vetted detections are then fed into Whale Safe’s alert tool, alongside sightings and model-based predictions, to tell nearby skippers to slow down. The team then monitors ships’ speeds within established slow zones via a widespread gps-tracking system and awards parent companies marks from a to f, visible online. With this week’s expansion to the east coast, Whale Safe will now assess companies across all slow-speed zones in North America.
How many whales have been saved is hard to say. But since Whale Safe first launched, Californian collisions seem to be decreasing: only four were reported in 2022, compared with 11 the year before. In the Santa Barbara channel, a collision hotspot, the proportion of ships that slow down has also been rising—from 46% in 2019 to 63.5% in 2023.
The idea is also catching on elsewhere. In 2022 Chile moored its first acoustic buoy to alert ships to blue, sei, humpback and southern-right whales. That same year Greek researchers published the results of a trial using buoys to detect sperm whales in the Mediterranean and to pinpoint their location in three dimensions, informed by work on the black boxes of lost planes. Another European project, led by a consortium of ngos and naval companies, is developing detection boxes that use thermal and infrared cameras, alongside other sensors, to help ships spot whales early.
For Mark Baumgartner at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who pioneered the use of acoustic buoys, the real solution lies in changing ships’ behaviour. After all, spotting a whale is useful only if the ship is moving slowly enough to react. This is why Canada has expanded mandatory speed restrictions to ever more areas where right whales live; America is considering doing the same. The International Maritime Organisation, a un agency, created a “Particularly Sensitive Sea Area” in the north-western Mediterranean last summer, the first such area explicitly created to mitigate ship strikes. Several companies are now rerouting ships away from sperm-whale habitats there. Similar efforts are under way in Sri Lanka and New Zealand.
It will not all be plain sailing. Some overlap between ships and whales is inevitable in busy ports. What’s more, slow container ships can still kill whales, as can smaller boats. Many coastal communities, whose economies rely on their ports and harbours, often resist stricter measures, such as mandatory speed limits or no-go areas. With all that in mind, it is easy to feel pessimistic on behalf of a species like the North Atlantic right whale. But like all whales that used to be hunted for meat and blubber, it has bounced back from the brink of extinction before. According to Dr Baumgartner, “Everyone that works on right whales has hope.”
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Get Ready for the Robotic Fish Revolution
March 26th, 2024Via Hakai Magazine, a look at how swarms of robotic fish could soon make traditional underwater research vehicles obsolete:
Human technology has long drawn inspiration from the natural world: The first airplanes were modeled after birds. The designer of Velcro was inspired by the irksome burrs he often had to pick off his dog. And in recent years, engineers eager to explore the world’s oceans have been taking cues from the creatures that do it best: fish.
Around the world, researchers developing robots that look and swim like fish say their aquatic automatons are cheaper, easier to use, and less disruptive to sea life than the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) scientists use today. In a recent review of the technology’s advances, scientists claim only a few technical problems stand in the way of a robotic fish revolution.
Over the past few decades, engineers have designed prototype robotic fish for a variety of purposes. While some are built to carry out specific tasks—such as tricking other fish in a lab, simulating fish hydrodynamics, or gathering plastics from the ocean—the majority are designed to traverse the seas while collecting data. These robotic explorers are typically equipped with video cameras to document any life forms they encounter and sensors to measure depth, temperature, and acidity. Some of these machines—including a robotic catfish named Charlie, developed by the CIA—can even take and store water samples.
While modern ROVs can already do all these tasks and more, the review’s authors argue that robotic fish will be the tools of the future.
“The jobs done by existing [ROVs] can be done by robotic fish,” says Weicheng Cui, a marine engineer at Westlake University in China and a coauthor of the review. And “what cannot be done by existing ROVs may [also] be done by robotic fish.”
Since the invention of the first tethered ROV in 1953—a contraption named Poodle—scientists have increasingly relied on ROVs to help them reach parts of the ocean that are too deep or dangerous for scuba divers. ROVs can go to depths that divers can’t reach, spend a virtually unlimited amount of time there, and bring back specimens, both living and not, from their trips.
While ROVs have been a boon for science, most models are large and expensive. The ROVs used by scientific organizations, such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and OceanX, can weigh nearly as much as a rhinoceros and cost millions of dollars. Such large, high-end ROVs also require a crane to deploy and must be tethered to a mother ship while in the water.
Robot fish have been designed to accomplish all sorts of tasks. This one, named Charlie, was built by the CIA to surreptitiously collect water samples. Photo by World Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
In contrast, robotic fish are battery-powered bots that typically weigh only a few kilograms and cost a couple thousand dollars. Although some have been designed to resemble real fish, robotic fish typically come in neutral colors and resemble their biological counterparts in shape only. Yet, according to Tsam Lung You, an engineer at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the review, even the most unrealistic robot fish are less disruptive to aquatic life than the average ROV.
Unlike most ROVs that use propellers to get around, robotic fish swim like the animals that inspired them. Flexing their tails back and forth, robotic fish glide through the water quietly and don’t seem to disturb the surrounding marine life—an advantage for researchers looking to study underwater organisms in their natural environments.
Because robotic fish are small and stealthy, scientists may be able to use them to observe sensitive species or venture into the nooks and crannies of coral reefs, lava tubes, and undersea caves. Although robotic fish are highly maneuverable, current models have one big downside: their range is very limited. With no mother ship to supply them with power and limited room to hold batteries, today’s robotic fish can only spend a few hours in the water at a time.
For robotic fish to make modern ROVs obsolete, they’ll need a key piece that’s currently missing: a docking station where they can autonomously recharge their batteries. Cui envisions a future where schools of small robotic fish work together to accomplish big tasks and take turns docking at underwater charging stations powered by a renewable energy source, like wave power.
“Instead of one [ROV], we can use many robotic fish,” Cui says. “This will greatly increase the efficiency of deep-sea operations.”
This potential future relies on the development of autonomous underwater charging stations, but Cui and his colleagues believe these can be built using existing technologies. The potential docking station’s core, he says, would likely be a wireless charging system. Cui says this fishy future could come to fruition in under a decade if the demand is great enough.
Still, getting scientists to trade in their ROVs for schools of robotic fish may be a tough sell, says Paul Clarkson, the director of husbandry operations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.
“For decades, we’ve benefited from using the remotely operated vehicles designed and operated by our research and technology partner, MBARI,” says Clarkson. “Their ROVs are an essential part of our work and research, and the capabilities they provide make them an irreplaceable tool.”
That said, he adds, “with the threats of climate change, habitat destruction, overfishing, and plastic pollution, we need to consider what advantages new innovations may offer in understanding our changing world.”
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Wearables For The Wild and An Internet of Animals: How Tracking Animal Movements May Save The Planet
February 23rd, 2024Courtesy of MIT Technology Review, a report on how researchers have been dreaming of an Internet of Animals and are now getting closer to monitoring 100,000 creatures—and revealing hidden facets of our shared world:
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.
The discovery did more than solve a minor mystery of animal behavior. Using the data they gathered from the sharks, the researchers were able to map an expanse of seagrass stretching across 93,000 square kilometers of Caribbean seabed—extending the total known global seagrass coverage by more than 40%, according to a study Gallagher’s team published in 2022. This revelation could have huge implications for efforts to protect threatened marine ecosystems—seagrass meadows are a nursery for one-fifth of key fish stocks and habitats for endangered marine species—and also for all of us above the waves, as seagrasses can capture carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests.
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.
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.
These Fitbits for wild creatures, to use Wikelski’s analogy, could produce live location data accurate to a few meters and simultaneously allow scientists to monitor animals’ heart rates, body heat, and sudden movements, plus the temperature, humidity, and air pressure in their surroundings. The signals they transmitted would be received by a three-meter antenna affixed to the International Space Station—the result of a €50 million investment from the German Aerospace Centre and the Russian Space Agency—and beamed down to a data bank on Earth, producing a map of the animals’ paths in close to real time as they crisscrossed the globe.
Wikelski and his peers hoped the project, formally the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, would provide insights about a much wider variety of animals than they’d previously been able to track. It also aimed to show proof of concept for Wikelski’s dream of the past several decades: the Internet of Animals—a big-data system that monitors and analyzes animal behavior to help us understand the planet and predict the future of the environment.
Researchers have been laying the groundwork for years, connecting disparate data sets on animal movement, the environment, and weather and analyzing them with the help of AI and automated analytics. But Wikelski had his sights on something even grander and more comprehensive: a dashboard in which 100,000 sensor-tagged animals could be simultaneously monitored as near-real-time data flowed in from Earth-imaging satellites and ground-based sources.
By bringing together each of these snapshots of animals’ lives, we might begin to understand the forces that are shaping life across the planet. The project had the potential to help us better understand and conserve the world’s most vulnerable species, showing how animals are responding to the challenges of climate change and ecosystem loss. It also promised another way to monitor the Earth itself during a period of increasing instability, transforming our animal co-inhabitants into sentinels of a changing world.
When ICARUS first went into space in 2018, it was widely celebrated in the press. Yet what should have been a moment of glory for Wikelski and the field of animal ecology instead became a test of his will. The ICARUS antenna first went down for a year because of a technical issue; it went back up but was only just out of testing in February 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine halted the project altogether.
Wikelski and his peers, though, have used the time since to innovate and evangelize. They now envision a more complete and technologically advanced version of the Internet of Animals than the one they hoped to build even just a few years ago, thanks to innovations in tracking technologies and AI and satellite systems. They have made even smaller and cheaper sensors and found a new, more affordable way to work in space with microsatellites called CubeSats. Their efforts have even gotten NASA to invest its time and resources into the possibility of building the Internet of Animals.
Now Wikelski and his collaborators are again on the verge, with an experimental CubeSat successfully transmitting data as part of a testing phase that started last June. If all goes as planned, another fully operational ICARUS CubeSat will begin collecting data next year, with more launches to follow.
The potential benefits of this system are extraordinary and still not yet fully understood, says Scott Yanco, a researcher in movement ecology at the University of Michigan. Perhaps it could help prevent mountain lion attacks or warn about a zoonotic disease about to make a jump to humans. It could alert researchers of behavioral changes that seem to happen in some animals before earthquakes, a phenomenon Wikelski has studied, and determine what conditions tell boobies in the Indo-Pacific to lay fewer eggs in years before strong El Niños or signal to weaver birds in the Niger Delta to build their nests higher up before floods.
“You can talk to 100 scientists about this,” Yanco says, “and they’re all going to give you a different answer of what they’re interested in.”
But first, a lot still needs to go right.
Animals as sentinels
When I first spoke with Wikelski, in early 2022, ICARUS was live, tracking 46 species from the ISS 400 kilometers overhead. Wearing a pair of square-rimmed glasses and speaking in a German accent with a tone of unfailing urgency, he was excited to tell me about a tagged blackbird who made a 1,000-or-so-kilometer crossing from Belarus to Albania.That was actually pretty routine, Wikelski said, but almost everything else he had been seeing over the past year of road-testing had been stranger than expected. White storks were crossing back and forth over the Sahara five times a season, without apparent reason. Cuckoos, which are tree-dwelling birds ill suited to long periods at sea, were making uninterrupted journeys from India to the Horn of Africa. “Now, any time you look, totally novel aspects appear, and novel connections appear across continents,” he told me.
This could have been a mystifying mess. But for Wikelski, it was “beautiful data.”
The practice of tagging animals to monitor their movements has been used for more than 100 years, though it began with a stroke of luck. In the 1820s, a hunter in a village in central Africa threw a 30-inch spear that lodged itself nonfatally in the neck of a white stork. This became what might have been the world’s first tag on a wild animal, says Yanco: the bird somehow flew back to Germany in the spring, helping settle the mystery of where storks disappeared to in the winter.
By the 1890s, scientists had started tracking wild birds with bands fitted around their legs—but 49 out of every 50 ring-tagged birds were never seen again. Starting in the 1960s, thousands of birds received very-high-frequency radio tags known as “pingers,” but these were only powerful enough to broadcast a few kilometers. To capture the data, researchers had to embark on cartoonish chase scenes, in which tagged birds were pursued by an oversize homing antenna pointed out the roof of a car, plane, or hang-glider.
Wikelski tried all three. During a stint at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the mid-’90s, he was studying thrushes and would gun an Oldsmobile around the Midwest at over 70 miles per hour. He’d set off as the songbirds got going at around 2 a.m., which tended to draw the attention of local police. Wikelski found that contrary to the conventional wisdom, thrushes used just 29% of their energy on their overnight migrations, less than they expended hunting and sheltering during stopovers. But the hassle of his process, which also entailed capturing and recapturing birds to weigh them, convinced Wikelski that, among other things, he needed better tools.
Thinking bigger (and higher)
It was not immediately clear that the solution to Wikelski’s problems would be in space, though the idea of tracking animals via satellite had been explored decades before his Oldsmobile experiments.In fact, NASA invented space-based animal tracking back in 1970 when it strapped a transmitter collar the weight of two bowling balls around the neck of Monique the Space Elk, a local news celebrity at the time. (Monique was actually two elks: the anointed Monique, who wore a dummy collar for testing and press photos, and another, who accidentally caught a misfired tranquilizer dart and subsequently got the satellite transmitter collar.) After the Moniques met untimely deaths—one from starvation, the other at the hands of a hunter—the project went dormant too.
But its research lived on in Argos, a weather monitoring system established in 1978 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the French space agency. It pioneered a way to track a tagged animal’s location by beaming up a short stream of analog data and measuring wave compression—the so-called Doppler shift—as a polar-orbiting satellite zoomed overhead at thousands of miles an hour. But this captured locations to only a few hundred meters, at best, and typically required a clear line of sight between tag and satellite—a challenge when working with animals below the canopy of rainforests, for instance.
Wikelski worked extensively with Argos but found that the technology didn’t enable him to capture the highly detailed whole-life data he craved. By the late ’90s, he was on an island in Panama, exploring an alternative approach that followed hundreds of animals from 38 species, including small mammals and insects.
Using six long-distance radio towers, Wikelski and Roland Kays, now the director of the Biodiversity Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, started to develop the Automated Radio Telemetry System (ARTS), a radio collar tracking system that could penetrate thick canopy. Crucially, ARTS revealed interactions between species—for example, how predatory ocelots support the island’s palm trees by eating large quantities of rabbit-like agoutis, after the rodents bury palm seeds underground as a snack for later. The researchers also found that despite what everyone believed, many of the animal inhabitants don’t remain on the island year-round, but frequently travel to the mainland. Kays and Wikelski had demonstrated in microcosm the kinds of insights that fine-grained multispecies tracking could provide even in challenging environments.
But Wikelski was frustrated that he couldn’t follow animals off the map. “If we don’t know the fate of an animal, we will never be able to really do good biology,” he says. The only solution would be to have a map with no edge.
This was around the time that GPS trackers became small enough to be used in animal tags. While radio tags like those used by Argos estimated location by transmitting signals to receivers, GPS systems like those in cars download data from three or more satellites to triangulate location precisely.
Wikelski became a man possessed by the idea of using this technology to create a truly global animal monitoring system. He envisioned digital tags that could capture GPS data throughout the day and upload packets of data to satellites that would periodically pass overhead. This idea would generate both excitement and a lot of skepticism. Peers told Wikelski that his dream system was unrealistic and unworkable.
At the turn of the millennium, he took a position at Princeton with the notion that the institutional pedigree might earn an audience for his “crazy” idea. Not long after he arrived, the chief of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came for a talk, and Wikelski asked whether the agency would benefit from a satellite system that could track birds. “He looked at me as if I came from a different planet,” Wikelski remembers. Still, he got a meeting with NASA—though he says he was laughed out of the building. By this time, the agency had apparently forgotten all about Monique.
Undeterred, in 2002 Wikelski launched ICARUS, a half-joke (for fans of Greek mythology) at his own immodest ambitions. It aimed to use digital GPS tags and satellites that would relay the information to a data center on Earth nearly as instantly as the ARTS system had.
Wikelski’s big ideas continued to run into big doubts. “At the time, people told us technology-wise, it will never work,” he says. Even 10 years ago, when Wikelski was making proposals to space agencies, he was told to avoid digital tech altogether in favor of tried-and-tested Argos-style communication. “Don’t go digital!” he recalls people telling him. “This is completely impossible! You have to do it analog.”
Moving away from the fringe
In the two decades since ICARUS was established, the scientific community has caught up, thanks to developments in consumer tech. The Internet of Things made two-way digital communications with small devices viable, while lithium batteries have shrunk to sizes that more animals can carry and smartphones have made low-cost GPS and accelerometers increasingly available.“We’re going from where we couldn’t really track most vertebrate species on the planet to flipping it. We’re now able to track most things,” says Yanco, emphasizing that this is possible “to varying degrees of accuracy and resolution.”
The other key advance has been in data systems, and in particular the growth of Movebank, a central repository of animal tracking data that was developed from Wikelski’s ARTS system. Movebank brings together terrestrial-animal tracking data from various streams, including location data from the Argos system and from new high-res digital satellites, like ICARUS’s antenna on the ISS. (There are also plans to incorporate CubeSat data.) To date, it has collected 6 billion data points from more than 1,400 species, tracking animals’ full life cycles in ways that Wikelski once could only dream about. It is now a key part of the plumbing of the animal internet.
The field also had some practical successes, which in turn allowed it to marshal additional resources. In 2016 in London, for instance, where air pollution was responsible for nearly 10,000 human deaths a year, researchers from Imperial College and the tech startup Plume Labs released 10 racing pigeons equipped with sensors for nitrogen dioxide and ozone emissions from traffic. Daily updates (tweeted out by the Pigeon Air Patrol account) showed how taking a pigeon’s path through the neighborhoods revealed pollution hot spots that weather stations missed.
Diego Ellis Soto, a NASA research fellow and a Yale PhD candidate studying animal ecology, highlights an experiment from 2018: flocks of storks were outfitted with high-resolution GPS collars to monitor the air movements they encountered over the open ocean. Tagged storks were able to capture live data on turbulence, which can be notoriously hard for airlines to predict.
Among the critical roles for these animal sensors was one that was once considered eccentric: predicting weather and the world’s fast-changing climate patterns. Animals equipped with temperature and pressure sensors essentially act as free-roaming weather buoys that can beam out readings from areas underserved by weather stations, including polar regions, small islands, and much of the Global South. Satellites struggle to measure many environmental variables, including ocean temperatures, which can also be prohibitively expensive for drones to collect. “Eighty percent of all measurements in Antarctica of sea surface temperature are collected by elephant seals, and not by robots or icebreakers,” Ellis Soto says. “These seals can just swim underneath the ice and [do] stuff that robots can’t do.” The seals are now tagged yearly, and the data they collect helps refine weather models that predict El Niño and sea-level rise.
When the ICARUS antenna was installed on the ISS in August 2018, it seemed poised to unlock even more capabilities and discoveries. In the antenna’s short life, the project recorded the movements of bats, birds, and antelope in near-real time, from Alaska to the islands of Papua New Guinea, and transferred the data to Movebank. But when the experiment ground to a premature halt, Wikelski knew he’d have to do something different, and he concocted a plan by which ICARUS could continue—whether it could rely on a major space agency or not.
Another shot
Rather than a system of major satellites, the new incarnation of ICARUS will run on CubeSats: low-cost, off-the-shelf microsatellites launched into low Earth orbit (around the same height as the ISS) for around $800,000, meaning even developing nations that harbor space ambitions can be part of the project. CubeSats also offer the benefit of truly global coverage; the ISS’s orbital path means it can’t pick up signals from polar regions further north than southern Sweden or further south than the tip of Chile.There’s currently one ICARUS CubeSat in testing, having launched into orbit last summer. If all goes well, a CubeSat funded by the Max Planck Society, in collaboration with the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, will launch next April, followed by another in winter 2025, and—they’re hoping—another in 2026. Each further addition allows the tags to upload once more per day, increasing the temporal resolution and bringing the system closer to truly real-time tracking.
Outfitting even small animals with lightweight, inexpensive GPS sensors, like the one on this blackbird, and monitoring how they move around the world could provide insights into the global effects of climate change.
Wikelski and his partners have also rededicated themselves to making even smaller tags. They’re close to the goal of getting them down to three grams, which would in theory make it possible to track more than half of mammal species and around two-fifths of birds, plus hundreds of species of crocodiles, turtles, and lizards. ICARUS’s tags are also now cheaper (costing just $150) and smarter. ICARUS developed AI-on-chip systems that can reduce the energy use by orders of magnitude to cut down on the size of batteries, Wikelski explains. There are also new tags being tested by scientists from the University of Copenhagen and Wikelski’s institute at Max Planck that harvest energy from animal movements, like a self-winding wristwatch. Finally, these new ICARUS sensors can also be reprogrammed remotely, thanks to their two-way Internet of Things–style communications. A new ecosystem of tag makers—professional and DIY—is further driving down prices, open-sourcing innovation, and allowing experimentation.
Still, not everyone has bought into ICARUS. Critics question the costs compared with those of existing terrestrial monitoring initiatives like MOTUS, a national Canadian bird conservation program that uses a network of 750 receiving towers. Others argue that researchers can make better use of the thousands of animals already tracked by Argos, which is upgrading to more accurate tags and is also set to launch a series of CubeSats. The total cost of a fully realized ICARUS system—100,000 animals at any one time, some of which die or disappear as new ones are tagged—is around $10 million to $15 million a year. “If you’re thinking about how to tag a moose or bighorn sheep, you might need to hire a helicopter and the whole team and the vet,” says Ellis Soto, who has long collaborated with Wikelski. “So the costs can be extremely, extremely limiting.”
But, proponents argue, the initiative would beget a lot more information than other Earth-imaging space missions and be significantly cheaper than sending humans or drones to collect data from remote locations like polar ice sheets. Wikelski also emphasizes that no one entity will bear the cost. He is working with local communities in Bhutan, South Africa, Thailand, China, Russia, and Nigeria and gets requests from people across the world who want to connect tags to ICARUS. With cheap satellites and cheap tags, he sees a route to scale.
Even as ICARUS explores a grassroots future, one of the biggest changes since the initial launch is the backing Internet of Animals technology has received from the biggest giant in the field: NASA. The agency is now two years into a five-year project to explore how it might get more involved in building out such a system. “We’re very much focused on developing future mission concepts that will come after the current set of ICARUS missions,” says Ryan Pavlick, a researcher in remote sensing of biodiversity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2024, this will mean “architecture studies” that aim to understand what technical systems might meet the animal-tracking needs of stakeholders including NOAA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the United States Geological Survey.
While NASA’s project aims to deliver benefits for the American people, a fully realized Internet of Animals would necessarily be global and interspecies. When we spoke in November 2023, Wikelski had just got off the phone discussing how ICARUS can help monitor the global “deal for nature” established by the UN’s COP15 biodiversity conference, whose targets include reducing extinction rates by a factor of 10.
Jill Deppe, who leads the National Audubon Society’s Migratory Bird Initiative, has boundless enthusiasm for how an Internet of Animals could affect organizations like hers. For a century, Audubon has watched migratory birds disappear on journeys to Chile or Colombia. A system that could tell us where birds are dying across the entire Western Hemisphere would allow Audubon to precisely target investments in habitat protection and efforts to address threats, she says.
“Our on-the-ground conservation work is all done on a local scale,” says Deppe. For migratory birds, ICARUS can link these isolated moments into a storyline that spans continents: “How do all of those factors and processes interact? And what does that mean for the birds’ survival?”
Movebank’s live-updating dashboard also makes more dynamic conservation action possible. Beaches can be closed as exhausted shorebirds land, wind farms can halt turbines as bats migrate through, and conservation-conscious farmers—who already aim to flood fields or drain them at times that suit migrating flocks—can do so with real knowledge.
In return, will animals really help us see the future of the planet’s climate?
No one is suggesting that animals take over from the system of satellites, weather stations, balloons, and ocean buoys that currently feed into meteorologists’ complex models. Yet technology that complements these dependable data streams, that captures the ever-changing biological signals of seals, storks, sharks, and other species, is already starting to fill in gaps in our knowledge. Once considered cryptic signs from the fates, or harbingers of doom, their behaviors are messages that have only just begun to show us ways to live on a changing planet.
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