2 April 2022 | New Scientist | 43‘Collective behaviour
is what gives animals
their “sixth sense” ’
To better understand what really happens in the natural world,
Martin Wikelski has created an animal version of the internet
of things. The insights are staggering, he tells Matthew Ponsford
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N SEPTEMBER 2020, a blackbird flew
1530 kilometres from Belarus to Albania.
As avian migrations go, it wasn’t that
impressive. But this journey was tracked from
the International Space Station, setting in
motion an ambitious project that could solve
some of the biggest mysteries in animal
behaviour, from how crop-eating plagues of
locusts form to whether some animals possess
a sixth sense to predict natural disasters.
ICARUS, International Cooperation for
Animal Research Using Space, is the brainchild
of Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck
Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. Hisidea, conceived two decades ago, is to create
what he calls an “internet of animals” by
fitting 100,000 creatures with miniaturised
transmitters that supply information about
them. It took a while to win the support of
German and Russian space agencies and bring
together a global group of collaborators, but,
since that first blackbird flight, hundreds of
animals have been fitted with custom-made
tags weighing just 5 grams. These don’t just
monitor their location, they also log aspects
of behaviour and physiology. A menagerie of
birds, bats, goats, rhinos, tortoises and more
has been sending signals to the ISS as well as >