2 April 2022 | New Scientist | 45Will ICARUS also allow you to predict the spread
of emerging and endemic diseases?
Again, yes. We already have ducks in China with
tags that record body temperature, which can
tell you about the next avian influenza: where
that is and whether it’s an important outbreak.
With flying foxes in Africa, you can take a blood
sample and see if an animal has encountered
diseases like Ebola. Then ICARUS is almost like
a coronavirus-tracking app: you know where
these animals have been, and if all the ones
with Ebola antibodies have been in eastern
Congo, you know that’s the place where they
picked up the disease.How can the internet of animals help
with conservation?
One thing we’re doing now is looking at
how other species can help us protect animals
like the rhino. In many areas of the world,
corrupt rangers are working with the guys
that poach rhinos. Now, we can tag the animals
around them – zebras, giraffes, wildebeests,
lions, wild dogs and so on – and they tell us
there’s something bad happening.
We are also using heart-rate loggers in
blackbirds, which give a measure of stress and
energy use. We want to know how expensive
it is to migrate, whether it is better to stay at
home or migrate. Maybe for a blackbird that’snot so important, but it is for an endangered
species – for shorebirds, a sea turtle or a big
fruit bat in Africa. It helps us understand which
habitats they need. We can also dynamically
guard them. If, for example, we see that
shorebirds, which in the old days flew directly
from Mauritania to the Netherlands, now,
with climate change, can’t get enough food
in Mauritania and have to land in France, we
can say: “Close the beaches for three days until
they recuperate.” Such dynamic interactions
between animals and humans are really only
possible if you have animals communicating
with you through these tags.Your free online database, Movebank, allows
anyone to track individual animals and get a
sense of their lives and dramas. How can this
help in conservation efforts?
If you say that we have lost 3 billion songbirds,
nobody cares. But if we have lost Fritz and Franz
and Helga somewhere between North America
and South America, and there are school
classes following those animals and knowing
their fates and knowing them individually,
it makes a total difference in conservation.
The other aspect is that people are learning
the good that animals bring us. Take fruit bats
in Africa: they are super important in many
areas for replanting trees because they fly
over open areas and spit down seeds.What does the future hold?
We want to track the Portuguese man-o-war,
a really poisonous, jellyfish-like creature.
And we are working on a new, improved
version of ICARUS. It will include very small
tags – 500 milligrams – that will go on desert
locusts. So, tracking the locust plague.
But the nice thing is, this is a bottom-up
movement. It isn’t directed by somebody.
Every day we get requests from people around
the world saying: “Hey, we want to understand
our animals – give us tools to do that.” Everybody
wants to do that, they just don’t have the
means to do it yet. It’s almost like giving people
a microscope, or a telescope to see the stars. ❚Matthew Ponsford is a London-
based journalist who writes The
Manuals, a newsletter and how-to
guide to ecological engineeringA 5-gram tag (below)
is used to track
white storks and
goats (above), and a
500-milligram tag will
be attached to locustsMPIAB/M
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