Sea Lions Equipped with Cameras Help Uncover Uncharted Ocean Habitats
August 14th, 2024
Via Terra Daily, a look at how tech-enabled sea lions are helping uncover ocean habitats: The world’s seabeds remain largely unexplored, with current knowledge being inconsistent. Utilizing remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) to study seabeds can be costly, dependent on weather conditions, and challenging in deep, remote areas.To address these obstacles, Australian researchers have turned […]
Read More »The ‘Internet of Animals’ Could Transform What We Know About Wildlife
August 1st, 2024
Courtesy of Yale e360, a look at how scientists studying migrations, endangered species, and global change are placing tracking devices on thousands of animals that will be monitored by a satellite-based system set to launch next year. If successful, the project could help illuminate the planet’s nonhuman worlds. Field biologists tend to be a patient […]
Read More »Diving With Penguins: Tech Gives Ocean Scientists a Bird’s-Eye View of Foraging in Antarctic Waters
July 15th, 2024
Via The Conversation, a look at how technology is being used to give ocean scientists a bird’s-eye view of foraging in Antarctic waters: Chinstrap penguins are members of Antarctica’s brush-tailed group of penguins. They’re easily identified by the feature that gives them their name – a black strap that runs from ear to ear below the […]
Read More »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 »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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