topic: Tagging

topic: Tagging

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Bangladesh uses satellite transmitters on saltwater crocodiles in Asia’s first
- On March 13, the Bangladesh forest department tagged satellite transmitters on two saltwater crocodiles for the first time in Asia and released them in the Sundarbans waters.
- So far, four saltwater crocodiles — three from captivity and one from the wild — have been tagged and the preparation is in place to tag more.
- The forest department has already started collecting data using the satellite transmitters to understand the crocodile’s habits in this ecosystem and identify nesting its hotspots, ecology, mortality rate and habitat range.
- Experts say the satellite data will play an important role in crocodile conservation in Bangladesh, where the species is critically endangered, and will help the authorities make proper conservation management plans to protect it.

Ancient giant river dolphin species found in the Peruvian Amazon
- Paleontologists discovered a fossilized skull of a newly described species of giant freshwater dolphin in the Peruvian Amazon, which lived around 16 million years ago and is considered the largest-known river dolphin ever found.
- The ancient creature, measuring 3-3.5 meters (9.8-11.5 feet), was surprisingly related to South Asian river dolphins rather than the local, living Amazon river pink dolphin and shared highly developed facial crests used for echolocation.
- The discovery comes at a time when the six existing species of modern river dolphins face unprecedented threats, with their combined populations decreasing by 73% since the 1980s due to unsustainable fishing practices, climate change, pollution, illegal mining and infrastructure development.
- Conservation efforts are underway, including the signing of the Global Declaration for River Dolphins by nine countries and successful initiatives in China and Indonesia, highlighting the importance of protecting these critical species that serve as indicators of river ecosystem health.

Mini radio tags help track ‘murder hornets’ and other invasive insects
- Our increasingly interconnected world is moving insect pests around the planet, introducing invasive species that threaten agriculture and local ecologies.
- But tech is fighting back: Researchers have developed radio-tracking tags small enough to attach to invasive yellow-legged hornets in the U.K. and Europe, allowing scientists to find and destroy their nests.
- Researchers are now deploying this technology in the U.S., to address yellow-legged hornets in Georgia and northern giant hornets in the Pacific Northwest.

New trackers bring prairie dogs’ little-known underground life to light
- Researchers have deployed a new tracker that helps them monitor prairie dogs and track their movements underground.
- The tracker uses sensors, including accelerometers and magnetometers, and combines them with GPS technology to enable researchers to retrace the trajectories of the animals.
- Prairie dogs dig up complex burrow systems and spend most of their time underground, making their movements elusive.
- During initial trials, researchers were able to use the trackers to reconstruct the trajectories of prairie dogs while they were underground.

AI unlocks secrets of Amazon river dolphins’ behavior, no tagging required
- Freshwater dolphins in the Amazon Basin navigate through flooded forests during the wet season using their flexible bodies and echolocation clicks.
- Researchers have combined advanced acoustic monitoring and AI to study the habits of endangered pink river dolphins (boto) and tucuxi in seasonally flooded habitats.
- They used hydrophones to record sounds in various habitats and employed convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify the sounds as either echolocation clicks, boat engine noises, or rain — with high accuracy.
- Understanding the dolphins’ movements and behaviors can aid conservation efforts to protect these endangered species, as they face various threats such as fishing entanglement, dam construction, mining, agriculture and cattle ranching.

Uterine implants and underwater ultrasounds aim to demystify shark births
- For years, studying the reproductive biology of sharks has depended on capturing the animals and dissecting them.
- Scientists recently developed the Birth Alert Tag, an egg-shaped satellite transmitter that can be implanted in the uterus of pregnant sharks to document the location and timing of births.
- In another development, scientists took ultrasound readings of whale sharks and sampled their blood to detect if they were pregnant.
- The new methods aim to help researchers determine sharks’ pregnancy status and the location of shark births; one goal is to inform the establishment of corridors to protect the animals, which are among the most vulnerable vertebrates on Earth.

‘Fitbit for whales’ and other tagging tech help reshape wildlife conservation
- Tagging technology has since the 1960s helped conservationists and researchers keep track of a wide range of wildlife species.
- But tags and collars can often be intrusive or invasive, acting as a source of stress to the animal and sometimes even undermining its survival.
- In recent years, researchers have developed new tag designs aimed at minimizing any impact their work might have on animals, while also providing a richer array of data.
- These solutions range from DIY radio collars made with cat collars, to bespoke tags for dolphins and whales that incorporate Apple Watch-like biometric sensors.

Herd opportunity: Hundreds of elephants return to DRC’s Virunga
- A group of about 580 savanna elephants recently returned to Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after crossing over from Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda.
- The reappearance of the elephants brings hope to a park that’s been beset with civil unrest, violence, and poaching for decades.
- In May, Virunga National Park closed due to the spread of COVID-19, which caused serious financial damage to the park.

What happens to an ecotourism town when the wildlife doesn’t show?
- Since the mid-1990s, the town of Donsol in the Philippines has based its economy around tourists viewing whale sharks.
- Whale sharks are migratory fish. And while they showed up in reliable numbers during the first decade of Donsol’s venture into shark tourism, their numbers have become highly unpredictable in the past decade for reasons still unknown.
- Tourism has declined as well, with 2018 registering the fewest visitor arrivals since whale shark tourism started. The local economy, which it had buoyed, is now flagging, although 2019 seems off to a strong start for both whale sharks and tourists.
- Wildlife tourism, by nature, is susceptible to biodiversity loss and changes in animal behavior; it places host communities on a thin line between profit and loss.

Angola pledges $60m to fund landmine clearance in national parks
- The Angolan government has announced a $60 million commitment to clear landmines in Luengue-Luiana and Mavinga national parks in the country’s southeast.
- The region is part of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area — home to incredible natural biodiversity, but also one of the most heavily mined regions of Angola.
- International funding for landmine clearance has fallen by 80 percent over the last 10 years, and without new funding Angola will miss its target of clearing all landmines by 2025.
- The HALO Trust, a demining NGO, and the Angolan government hope that clearance of landmines will stimulate conservation in southeastern Angola and provide alternative livelihoods such as ecotourism to alleviate poverty and diversify the country’s economy away from oil.

Tiny tracking tags help decode how echolocating bats navigate
- Although navigation in echolocating bats has been studied for a long time, questions remain on how bats differentiate among echoes from different objects.
- Researchers designed a small, lightweight tag that can capture movement and sound information in three dimensions to create a map of a bat’s sensory environment.
- The data helped researchers pinpoint the movements of bats during flight and while catching prey, as well as how echoes from various objects differ.
- One-third of bat species are threatened with extinction or lack basic ecological data, so such information can help scientists and wildlife managers understand bats’ foraging behavior and develop better measures for their conservation.

‘Landscape of fearlessness’: bushbuck emboldened following top-predator decline in Mozambique
- Bushbuck in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park have become increasingly fearless in their foraging habits, changing from foraging exclusively in woodland areas to braving open floodplains.
- Following years of civil war, populations of large herbivores and carnivores in Gorongosa declined by over 90 percent, with some top predators completely extirpated.
- Researchers from Princeton University conducted experiments using state-of-the-art equipment to establish whether the bushbucks’ use of floodplains for foraging was due to the decline in predation threat.
- Following experimentally simulated predation events, bushbuck significantly increased their use of tree cover, indicating that the reintroduction of top predators would restore a ‘landscape of fear’.

Creating a high-tech island to save one of the world’s rarest birds
- Scientists in New Zealand are combining tracking, genomics, and drone technologies to save the kākāpō, the giant flightless parrot nearly eradicated by invasive predators, such as dogs, rats, and cats brought by human settlers.
- Data loggers on a predator-free island read information emitted by transmitters worn by each of the birds and send the data to the research team; the information tells researchers where birds are nesting, when birds are sick, and when (and with whom) a given bird mated.
- The team supplements natural kākāpō breeding with artificial insemination, including flying a sperm-carrying drone that can swiftly move sperm from a male to an appropriate female across the island, which the researchers believe helps keep the sperm more viable when it reaches the female.
- For this, scientists “match” male and female kākāpō using genetic analysis to determine how closely related the two birds are and choose mates that are most distantly related. The research team is reviewing genomic data from all adult kākāpō for clues about fertility and disease.

‘Judas’ snakes lead scientists on a high-tech Easter egg hunt for pythons
- Scientists are exploring various technologies to address the spread of highly invasive Burmese pythons, which have devastated native mammal and bird populations across much of southern Florida.
- Researchers who recently captured a large pregnant Burmese python did so using the “Judas” technique: the radio-tagging of adult pythons that will approach others of the opposite sex during the breeding season, “betraying” them to the research teams.
- More recently, separate research teams have trialed the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to determine the spatial distribution, range limits, and expansion rates of Burmese pythons in the region. They found python eDNA within a wildlife refuge, indicating that the invaded area extends further north than previously thought and that pythons are likely resident there.

Solving the mystery of the UK’s vanishing hen harriers
- The numbers of breeding hen harriers, one of England’s rarest birds and a protected species, dropped sharply in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
- To better understand why hen harriers were vanishing, researchers tracked the movements of 58 birds using satellite-based tags in conjunction with remote sensing land management data.
- Birds with tags that stopped transmitting spent their last week of life predominantly on moors where hunters shoot grouse and were 10 times more likely to disappear or die when grouse moors dominated their ranges, suggesting they were killed.
- The findings indicated that 72 percent of the tagged harriers were either confirmed or considered very likely to have been illegally killed.

Those kicks were fast as lightning: Kangaroo rats evade deadly snake strikes
- A research team has shown that desert kangaroo rats fend off predatory rattlesnakes through a combination of speedy reaction times, powerful near-vertical leaps, and mid-air, ninja-style kicks.
- Locating snakes through radio tracking and filming snake-kangaroo rat interactions with high-speed video cameras enabled the team to analyze strike and reaction speed, distance and angle the rats moved to avoid being bitten, and aspects of the impressive maneuverability displayed by most kangaroo rats in the recordings.
- About 81 percent of recorded snake strikes were accurate, yet the snake actually bit the kangaroo rat in just 47 percent of the strikes and latched on long enough in just 22 percent of strikes to actually kill and eat the kangaroo rat.
- The slowed-down videos demonstrate the importance of kangaroo rats’ physical features, including long tails and powerful legs, and mid-air maneuverability in escaping predation.

Something smells fishy: Scientists uncover illegal fishing using shark tracking devices
- Sharks become unlikely detectives as marine ecologists discover a link between their acoustic telemetry data and the presence of illegal fishing vessels.
- Researchers acoustically tagged 95 silvertip and grey reef sharks to assess whether the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) Marine Protected Area was helping to protect these species.
- Detailed in a recently released paper, the almost simultaneous loss of 15 acoustic tags coincided with the capture of two illegal fishing vessels, arrested for having 359 sharks on board.
- While helping to map sharks’ movements around the reef, scientists expect that they will be able to use data collected from the acoustic tags to predict the presence of illegal fishing vessels.

Blue whales remember best times and places to find prey
- A new study demonstrates that blue whales in the northern Pacific Ocean use their memories, instead of cues in the environment, to guide them to the best feeding spots.
- The researchers used 10 years of data to discern the movements of 60 blue whales.
- They compared the whales’ locations with spots with high concentrations of prey over the same period.
- The whales’ reliance on memory could make them vulnerable to changes in the ocean brought about by climate change.

As animal tagging goes cutting-edge, ethical questions abound
- An increasing number of animal tracking devices, known as biologgers, also measure environmental variables such as sound, temperature, and ocean salinity.
- Data from biologgers complement information on an animal’s movements and help scientists understand its environment, but can have measurable effects on the animal’s behavior or reproduction.
- As the field of biologging rapidly grows, scientists are trying to develop ethical frameworks for applying devices to wild animals.

A ‘FitBit for squid’ could help track the ocean’s squishier species
- The ITAG, a neutrally buoyant sensor device for soft-bodied invertebrates, is currently in development through joint research at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Monterey Bay Aquatic Research Institute.
- The device has shown success in tracking animals such as squid and jellyfish as they respond to environmental changes.
- The casing is 3D printable, and the electronics array will be open-sourced, so scientists may quickly develop tracking devices for other marine invertebrates previously difficult to monitor.
- The current ITAG versions are smaller and more easily retrievable than a 2015 prototype, but researchers are still working to bring the size down and the retrieval rates up.

10 ways conservation tech shifted into auto in 2018
- Conservation scientists are increasingly automating their research and monitoring work, to make their analyses faster and more consistent; moreover, machine learning algorithms and neural networks constantly improve as they process additional information.
- Pattern recognition detects species by their appearance or calls; quantifies changes in vegetation from satellite images; tracks movements by fishing ships on the high seas.
- Automating even part of the analysis process, such as eliminating images with no animals, substantially reduces processing time and cost.
- Automated recognition of target objects requires a reference database: the species and objects used to create the algorithm determine the universe of species and objects the system will then be able to identify.

Satellite trackers help fight vultures’ extinction in southern Africa
- Vultures in southern Africa are being killed, mainly by eating carcasses poisoned by farmers, and in collisions with power lines and wind turbines.
- Concerned about population declines, the Maloti-Drakensberg Vulture Project began tracking vulture movements with small GPS transmitters, only to find them dying at a rapid rate.
- The three-dimensional tracking data showing the overlap between vulture breeding and roosting areas resulted in cancellation of a pair of proposed wind farms in Lesotho and a call for more ecologically informed siting of needed renewable energy infrastructure.

In pursuit of the rare bird that vanishes for half the year
- Until recently, the habits and habitats of the Bengal florican remained a mystery: males were easily seen in their seasonally flooded grassland habitat during the breeding season but effectively disappeared for half the year.
- Researchers in India and Nepal combined field surveys, satellite telemetry and remote sensing to model the distribution and assess the critically endangered bird’s movements, survival and home ranges.
- After years of not knowing the birds’ non-breeding whereabouts, the study found that Bengal floricans leave their protected, seasonally flooded breeding areas in favor of unprotected low-intensity agricultural fields and other upland grasslands during their non-breeding season.

Filling in the gaps: Managing endangered species on the high seas
- Information about how marine animals move through the oceans has become vitally important as efforts progress to create a global plan for securing sustainable fish stocks in the high seas. Researchers are integrating new technologies and applying new approaches to data sets to find answers.
- A recent examination of the long-term Tagging of Pelagic Predators (TOPP) data set has mapped the travel patterns of marine predators — certain whale, turtle, tuna, shark, and seabird species — through their life cycles.
- The study showed that many of these predators spend over half their time on the high seas, supporting the need for global strategies to protect and monitor the high seas. Vessel identification systems paired with several emerging satellite technologies can help.

Stay or go? Understanding a partial seasonal elephant migration
- Elephants in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park wearing GPS tracking tags shared a general dry-season home range but followed three different wet-season migration strategies: residency, short-distance migration, and long-distance migration.
- Despite similar dry-season conditions that kept all the tagged elephants near provisioned waterholes, the migrating elephants began their seasonal movements at the onset of the first rains.
- Scientists urge collaboration among stakeholders and countries to maintain the long-distance, cross-border migrations some animals need to survive.

Tiny tags and a broad research network help track small animal movements
- Despite great advances in radio-telemetry technology, tracking small animals still presents challenges due to the weight of tracking equipment.
- The Motus Wildlife Tracking System uses nano-tags as light as 0.2 grams to track even small birds and insects.
- Based on a collaborative deployment of automated telemetry receivers, Motus can track animals over a broad geographical region to help answer fundamental questions about animal movements, leading to insights that can help protect migratory species as they traverse the landscape.

Tagging and tracking the Tour de Turtles
- The Sea Turtle Conservancy’s Tour de Turtles kicked off last month, tagging and tracking 17 sea turtles during a marathon migration.
- Turtles wear small transmitters during the annual event as they travel thousands of miles to from their nesting beaches to feeding grounds.
- Data collected from satellite telemetry help scientists gain a clearer understanding of how four species of turtles behave at sea, furthering efforts to protect endangered species.

Tracking elephant movements reveals transboundary wildlife corridors
- Data from satellite tracking tags on 120 elephants in southern Africa have identified a suite of wildlife movement corridors across five southern African countries, suggesting the importance of cross-border coordination.
- Wide-ranging movements of elephants include dispersal from northern Botswana north into Angola and south toward the Kalahari Desert.
- Research findings have suggested that open and unimpeded movement corridors can help reduce conflict with human residents while blocked corridors can push elephants and other wildlife into new developments or villages, resulting in increased conflict.

Tracking tools identify regional hubs of whale shark activity
- Researchers tracked 17 juvenile whale sharks tagged at three sites in the Philippines to understand how their movements related to food sources and fishing grounds in Southeast Asia.
- They found that juvenile sharks moved quickly and widely through the Bohol and Sulu seas but remained near their feeding sites within Philippine waters.
- In combination with other studies, these findings suggest that locally focused whale shark conservation efforts are critical and must consider the movements juvenile whale sharks make within zones of several hundred square kilometers.

A ‘perfect policy storm’ cuts puma numbers by almost half near Jackson, Wyoming
- A 14-year study following 134 tagged mountain lions north of Jackson, Wyoming, found a 48 percent reduction in their numbers.
- The researchers found that the combination of the reintroduction of wolves and increases in elk and mountain lion hunting led to the precipitous drop.
- Lead study author and Panthera biologist Mark Elbroch recommends suspending puma hunting for three years in the region to allow the population to recover.

New tagging tech for great white shark tracking in New York waters
- Mongabay editor Erik Hoffner joined a research team studying juvenile great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) just offshore of Long Island, New York, an area that has been identified as a great white ‘nursery.’
- Some of the technology being deployed via tags on sharks for this study will return unprecedented information on the species.
- Here we present a series of images from the program and of this particular shark’s capture and release.

Fishing gear poses the greatest danger to young great whites off the West Coast of the U.S.
- Fishing lines and nets pose the most significant threat to the survival of young white sharks in the waters off Mexico and southern California, according to a new study.
- A team of scientists used a relatively “untapped” but ubiquitous storehouse of data to develop a statistical model for the survival rates of juvenile white sharks.
- The researchers calculated that 63 percent of young white sharks living in this part of the Pacific survive annually, but that nearly half probably come in contact with gillnets set by commercial fishers.
- The findings point to best practices, such as barring gillnets from inshore “nurseries” and asking fishers to check their nets for trapped sharks more regularly, that could help protect great whites.

Longest recorded whale shark migration eclipses 20,000 kilometers
- Scientists followed the movements of a whale shark for nearly two and a half years as she swam more than 20,000 kilometers (over 12,000 miles) from the coast of Central America to the Marianas Trench near Asia.
- Whale sharks, whose numbers have dropped by more than half in the past 75 years according to the IUCN, are taken by fishing boats for their fins, cartilage, meat and teeth, and studies have shown that boats bringing tourists to swim with the largest fish in the ocean change the species’ behavior.
- Given these threats, scientists hope studies such as this one will help guide conservation policy aimed at protecting these animals throughout their migrations.

Location, location, location: Facts and FAQs about radio telemetry
- In this second of the Mongabay-Wildtech series on “What is that technology?” we examine radio telemetry, in the form of electronic tags used to monitor animals as they move about their daily lives to better understand how far they travel, what environments they use, and how to keep them safe.
- Radio-based tags and satellite-based tags, which include GPS tags, all communicate via radio signals but differ in how the signals communicate, the information they provide, and the energy needed to produce them.
- UHF and VHF radio tags–described in this post–are cheap, small, light, and long-lasting, but require human presence to receive the signals and locate the animal.
- Scientists can compile these point locations to map species’ local distributions, identify home ranges and migration patterns, and compare these with locations of water, food species, or human activity.

Swallowing swimming pools: New sensory tags capture kinetics of lunge-feeding whales
- Researchers have developed and deployed sensory tags with video cameras to study how rorquals, a type of baleen whale, lunge feed and maximize their consumption despite the huge energetic cost.
- Comprehending the dynamics of lunge feeding and its energy tradeoffs could inform whale conservation and fisheries management.
- The scientists hope to develop the tags with a more compact design, more reliable sensors, and longer battery life, and they want to better understand the baleen and compare and analyze lunge feeding and its energetics across whales.

Powering aquatic research with self-charging tags
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers have developed the first self-charging tracking tag, an implanted acoustic transmitter that harnesses energy from the swimming animal bearing it, for studying fish behavior throughout the organisms’ lives.
- The scientists hope the tag will help us better understand long-lived and migratory species of concern, as well as comprehend and mitigate the ramifications of dams and marine energy on fish movement and survival.
- The team will field-test the tag on white sturgeon in the Columbia and Snake rivers next year.

Light, long-lasting and low-cost: the technology needs of field conservationists and wildlife researchers
- The concurrent challenges of remoteness, extreme temperatures, dust, high rainfall and humidity, dense vegetation and steep terrain all complicate and limit the use of existing and emerging technologies for nature conservation and research.
- Survey responses of front-line conservationists suggest that no single technology will stop either wildlife poaching or human-wildlife conflict.
- Researchers everywhere desire smaller, lighter, longer-lasting, and more affordable devices that better withstand humidity, dust and damage.
- Integrated, automated devices and systems for detecting, monitoring, and providing early warning of movements of people and animals would revolutionize conservation and research work across species, ecosystems, and countries.

Animal action: new sensor tag tech could link animal behavior and conservation science
- Sensor tags are helping quantify how animals interact with humans and their environment.
- The technology faces limitations of cost and scale, ethical decisions, and the challenges of big data analysis.
- In the future, sensor tags could inform conservation science and offer a diffuse, animal-mounted view of a changing world.

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