The ‘Internet of Animals’: A new satellite-based system could transform what we know about wildlife
The inexpensive, globe-spanning system of animal tagging is meant to help scientists understand the precise drivers of global change, and much more, by tracking thousands of tagged animals from space and tying their experiences to the broader impacts facing whole populations or even species. The system can zero in on specific issues — for instance, a bird species dying out because a particular insect it eats is being killed by a particular chemical being sprayed in an area. Such information could drive people to act accordingly.
HILLARY ROSNER: Back in 2001, sitting on a porch one evening in Panama, the German ornithologist had the germ of an idea for an “internet of animals,” a global system of sensor-wearing wildlife that would reveal the planet’s elusive, nonhuman worlds. He figured he could get it up and running by 2005. Nearly 20 years later, Wikelski may have finally succeeded—after surmounting roadblocks that range from bureaucratic mishaps to technical glitches to a geopolitical crisis. His space-based system, known as ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space), is now scheduled to launch, in its latest, satellite-based incarnation, on a private rocket sometime in 2025.
The underlying idea of the internet of animals is to tune into the planet’s hidden phenomena—the flight paths followed by sharp-shinned hawks, the precise fates befalling Arctic terns that die young, the exact landscape requirements of critically endangered saiga antelope—by attaching tiny, solar-powered tracking devices, some weighing less than a paperclip, to all kinds of organisms and even some inanimate objects (glaciers, ocean plastic debris). The inexpensive, globe-spanning system of animal tagging is meant to help scientists understand the precise drivers of global change, and much more, by tracking thousands of tagged animals from space and tying their experiences to the broader impacts facing whole populations or even species.
Wikelski, the director of the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, in Germany, said the prospect of having that data, and of “making people aware of the incredible beauty and richness of what’s happening out there,” has made the effort worthwhile, even urgent.
It’s also true, as he wrote in his recent book The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth, that he “had no clue how many pitfalls there would be… how many times when we desperately wanted to give up, because the whole process had become so exquisitely frustrating that we just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
In 2018, after years of working with designers, engineers, and government officials from multiple countries and continents, Wikelski’s team saw its ICARUS receiver launch aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan to the International Space Station, where Russian cosmonauts attached it to their side of the orbiting lab. “We danced, cried, and hugged one another,” Wikelski wrote of the launch. “All the stress of nearly 20 years fell away.”
The internet of animals went live in March 2020, but before the year was out, mechanical issues on the Russian ISS module took the system down. Nearly a year passed before it was up and running again. By the spring of 2021, the system was finally humming along, receiving data from roughly 3,500 tagged animals around the world. But then, in the winter of 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the West cut ties with Russia. ICARUS’s transmission of data abruptly halted.
After the ISS failure, Wikelski’s team set out to redesign the system to use satellite-based receivers, which had always been its long-term aim. In 2022, plans seemed almost set for an ICARUS receiver to orbit on the next GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite, a joint venture between NASA and the German space agency, scheduled to launch in 2028. But last-minute political haggling siphoned more than a third of the project’s German funding, leaving no money to include ICARUS. “We were totally devastated,” Wikelski recalled. He gave his project three months to find a solution or finally give up. “That’s when we scaled down and said, we need a CubeSat.”
And so beginning sometime next year, the project plans to launch ICARUS receivers on five relatively low-cost CubeSats—miniature satellites roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube and weighing only a couple of pounds—using private launch companies. Funded by the Max Planck Society, the system will cost roughly $1.6 million to launch and have annual operating expenses of around $160,000…
Ultimately, researchers hope that ICARUS data can “help us pinpoint effective conservation strategies,” Aikens said. “It can help us identify pinch points on the landscape.” While this is already happening for some species, including North American ungulates like elk and pronghorn antelope, whose migrations researchers have tracked for years, for most of the planet’s species “we lack this data and this wide coverage of information, which makes these fine-scale interventions a lot harder to achieve. That’s a place that ICARUS can help fill in a lot of gaps.”
And if the internet of animals can zero in on specific issues — for instance, a bird species dying out because a particular insect it eats is being killed by a particular chemical being sprayed in an area — Wikelski believes such information could drive people to act. “People are willing to do something about it if they know that what they do is really helpful,” he said. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: