How Scientists Track Wild Animals (Without Ever Seeing Them)

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How do scientists study animals that spend their lives hiding, migrating thousands of miles, or living deep underwater?

In this episode of Wildly Curious, Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole explore the incredible technology that's transforming wildlife research. From radar that detects millions of migrating birds to satellites tracking whales from space, conservation has become a real-life spy mission. 

Discover how researchers can monitor animals without disturbing them—and sometimes without ever seeing them at all.

In this episode:

🛰️ How the International Space Station helps scientists track wildlife around the globe through the ICARUS program. 

📡 Why weather Doppler radar doesn't just detect storms—it can reveal bird migration, bats leaving caves, and even massive insect swarms. 

🌳 How LiDAR lasers create detailed 3D maps of forests to identify critical wildlife habitat hidden beneath the canopy. 

🧬 The fascinating science of environmental DNA (eDNA), allowing researchers to identify species from tiny traces of genetic material left behind in water, soil, and even air. 

🎙️ How passive acoustic monitoring uses AI and machine learning to recognize birds, frogs, bats, and entire ecosystems simply by listening. 

🤖 Why scientists build lifelike robotic "spy animals" that secretly film wildlife behaving naturally in the wild. 

These technologies are helping scientists understand migration, protect endangered species, detect invasive animals, monitor habitat health, and make better conservation decisions—all while minimizing disturbance to the wildlife they're trying to protect.

If you love wildlife biology, animal behavior, conservation, bird migration, ecology, or cutting-edge science, this episode is packed with some of the coolest technology you've probably never heard of.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone. All right, brief pause and everything because I've been moving and life is just life. Today, though, this is gonna be a fun one, I think, anyway. Um, we're gonna be talking about how we can use technology to help us track and monitor wildlife.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Which I'm excited about. And if you guys whoever, if you if you're a regular listeners and you've been listening, you know that we've partnered with Follow, who uses wildlife tech to monitor wildlife. A lot of it.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Yeah, a lot of a lot of variety of it. So they because they partner with different organizations, you know, they base off of whatever they're tracking, based off of whatever those organizations are tracking, which is honestly a variety of a lot of these, a lot of these different ones. So before we jump in, Laura, did you have nature news?

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Yeah, but it's more like like nature warning. Yeah, okay. Well, I got I got sent it and I I had seen this, but I didn't really want to look at it, but here I am looking at it. And this is a neuron eck of the woods. This is the possible flesh-eating screw worm. Yeah, screw worms, yep. Yeah. So the there is the New World Screw Worm, which is a flesh-eating larva of a fly. It has been making the the rounds through Central America and Mexico, and it's most recently been seen at least 25 within 25 miles of the US border, but now they think there might be a potential case that they're looking into in Texas. Yep. So, like any good maggot, these things the fly lays its eggs in a wound. You know, normally, normally in animals, but sometimes in people. So, yeah, screw worm detected in Mexico found in a five-year-old goat is it's a parasite. It it eats you. Yeah. 26,000 screw worm cases identified across Mexico. That's a lot. And I guess people are like, you know, what's the big deal? Well, it it can cause major issues if it's late. Yeah, I mean, rightfully so. Last year, the first case of a New World Screwworm infestation in a human was confirmed in the US. He had returned to Maryland from El Salvador. But totally. But in you, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, keep keep your keep your wounds closed.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Screw worms out. That's so gross. So gross.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

All right. With that, let's jump into technology.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, I guess tracking, they're not really tracking screw worms with any of this stuff, other than hey, whenever they visually see cases. Well, I guess maybe one of mine might. Uh no, probably not. All right. I was hopeful there for a brief second. I can go first.

unknown 2:47

Cool.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

I'm ready. So we each took different, we took different types of tech, not necessarily products, but overarching groups of tech to kind of talk about how they work, what they use them for, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:59

I mean you can Wait, what was my group? Wait, did I have a group? I know we briefly talked about it.

SPEAKER_02 3:04

It's like, are you doing products or are you doing more like things? You were like, no, I'm not doing products, I'm doing like things. Things. Yes, I'm doing things. So mine's like a group of like it's not just cameras. It's specific. It's like a group of cameras. Yes, it's a good thing. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Okay. All right. Now that Laura and I have that out of the way. My first thing, I guess, I'm gonna be talking about is radar. Which again is most people I feel like overlook it unless you're a birder. And then we're constantly doing migration, you know, looking at all this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

Radar, you're right. I guess because there's everyone's heard of radar, but I don't even know if people know how it works.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

No, nope. Okay, so if you've ever pulled up a weather radar map and seen the blobs, colorful blobs hanging out, isn't that supposed to be a storm? Most cases it is, but not all the time are those blobs weather at all. Some a lot of times they can be animals and not just a few animals. We're talking like thousands, sometimes millions across the skies. Yeah, cloud. Yeah, because it has to be a lot. We did our swarmed episode a while back, and that one, the locusts and stuff, definitely picks up, definitely, definitely picks up on radar. So, weather radar has been around for decades. The modern Doppler Weather Radar Network that most Americans are familiar with today, it began rolling out in the 90s, which is crazy to think because that wasn't all that long ago. But it's the one that we know of today, right? The one that we picture today. And that came out through the National Weather Service's NexRAD system. And more than 150 radar stations now scan the skies across the United States every few minutes. Meteorologists use it to track rain, hail, snow, severe storms. But over the years, they kept noticing odd signals mixed in with the weather data, strange patterns, unusual movements, echoes that didn't quite behave like storms. And eventually scientists realized, like, huh. I wonder if. And they started realizing that it was birds, bats, insects.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

And that's just got this just got brought up like two weeks ago when I was talking with people about bats, because somebody I knew until like the Carlsbad Caverns, and I was like, oh yeah, like so many freaking bats come out at night that it shows up on radar.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Yeah, a lot. And and scientists have honestly, this isn't a new phenomenon, right? I said the Doppler radar that we know of today has been around since the 90s, but again, this has been Doppler radar has been along around for quite a while. And scientists have been noticing the mysterious, I don't know, biological blobs since at least the 40s. So during World War II, radar operators sometimes would pick up strange targets that they couldn't explain. And most of the time it turned out to be flocks of birds. So, how does that happen? Well, Doppler weather radar works by sending out pulses of radio waves into the atmosphere. Those waves travel outward until they hit something, then some of that energy basically bounces back to the radar station. And that's how meteorologists can tell where rain is falling, where hail is forming, and whether a storm might be rotating. And if you ever look, I'm the nerd who has the radar apps and it shows all the different types of radars that can show debris and altitude. So there's all kinds of different breakdowns of radar that we have nowadays. Way more complex. So here's the thing though that about radar, it doesn't really know what it's hitting, it just knows it's hitting something. And so that's left up to then scientist meteorologist to say, hey, this is like we know something is being reflected in the signal, and then just looking at it and they study it, and then they're like, Oh, this is this is what it is. So basically, think about standing in a dark room shouting for echoes, and whenever you're listening for those echoes, you might be able to tell like something is out there, human echolocation without it being human echolocation, but you don't know necessarily know precise direction or anything. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure this is where like AI computer modeling comes in, right? Oh, yeah, I totally can. Once scientists realized that animals were showing up on the weather radar, they started noticing some of the strange behaviors and patterns. On clear evenings, enormous clouds would suddenly appear on radar and begin moving across the landscape. Sometimes radar stations would detect giant rings that seemed to expand outward from a single point, which would be terrifying to see on a radar whenever you're like, is it gonna rain tonight? And it's like you don't know what the heck that's that's coming from, right? Um, which is nonsense.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

No, right? Right? And other times there were broad waves of movement crossing entire regions, despite the fact that there weren't any storms nearby. And once researchers kind of figured out what to look for, the culprits became pretty obvious. It was birds leaving their nighttime roosts, bats emerging from caves, even massive swarms of insects, like I talked about briefly earlier, taking advantage of favorable weather conditions, the locusts that need to fly and breed and mate. So one of my favorite examples though is come from right here in Texas. And if you've ever seen the footage of Bracken Caves, the bats pouring out of the caves at sunset, you know it's insanely, insanely oppressive. So at Bracken Caves, right outside in of San Antonio, Texas, an estimated 15 to 20 million Mexican freetailed bats emerge during the summer, making it one of the largest or the largest colony of concentrations of mammals on Earth. When those bats leave the cave at dusk, weather radar definitely picks up that cloud and expansion of every single night whenever it's going out, which is which is crazy. And totally look up video footage of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

I have one that's gonna follow up so perfect with this one.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Okay, good. So the biggest reason, other than bats, because you guys all know, I just like things that fly really. Freaking bats. Dude, I love bats. The other way, and that's what I was saying, birders use it, okay, is systems that could track migration across entire regions over real time. So it does help with conservation efforts. So during fall migration, spring migration, scientists can measure how like how the number of birds, where they are, and the peak migrations at night, and how they're moving across North America all at the same time. And and we can see how that shifts over time with climate change and stuff like that. All kinds of things, yeah. And again, as the sun sets, like you'll notice it. If you go to birdcast. Is it org?

SPEAKER_02 9:55

I can't remember. But birdcast, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Yeah, if you go to birdcast, just Google it, they'll show you, like, hey, this is whenever the peak migrate for birding, this is whenever the peak migration is supposed to hit, and you can see as the sun goes down, there's like the band that'll go across, be like, sundown, and it'll be like and it's like a heat map, and it just heats up, and they can predict that from this radar. It's kind of like rush hour traffic, but overnight, because that's when birds are going to be moving the most. So once scientists again realized that the radar could track animal movement, it suddenly became a powerful conservation tool. Researchers can identify major migration corridors, track changes in migration patterns over time, and even predict when large migration events most likely occur. And that information can help answer some really important questions, especially down here in Texas, how big development is and how fast development is expanding. So, but they're looking for things like are birds arriving earlier than they used to? Are migration routes changing? Which habitats are most important for animals to stop and rest, like McGee Marsh. You know, that's how they figured out wow, this is real and really important. Before they make that leap over the Great Lakes, they go ahead and they stop off and make Ghee Marsh. And that's kind of like I would say the big takeaway here is you yeah, we can talk about bird conservation all we want, but radar has really helped us to figure out where they are and where they're. Yeah, and being able to see, oh, hey, this is important protected lands. And so for decades, millions of birds, bats, insects, and everything have been flying through those radar beams every single night. Necessarily didn't really didn't realize what they were looking at first, but once we figured all of that out, it ended up being a really powerful conservation tool. So something that most people don't think about is just weather radar, but picking up everything else birds, bats, insects.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Yeah. Well, mine follows up perfectly with that because I was gonna talk about LIDAR. Oh, which I I actually hadn't even heard of the term, but I totally know what like once I've described it. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Oh, okay, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:00

So it stands for light detection and rating.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

I do it with all the GIS stuff. Like because that goes normally goes hand in hand with GIS stuff, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

Yeah, totally. So light detection and rating and ranging. So it's a remote sensing device that uses lasers to create 3D images. It's very similar to radar, but instead of using sound, it's using lasers. So here's how it works. The device, whatever whatever device this is, they can be big or small, just depends on what it is. The lighter device sends out tons, thousands to millions of laser pulses every second. The lasers bounce off of an object, and the machine then measures how long it takes each laser pulse to come back, which allows it to calculate distance very accurately. And since it can determine distance, it can then generate a precise 3D map. So I said, basically sonar or radar, but with lasers. The images are made up of dots because these are indicating all the individual laser points. So the image that it makes is often called a point cloud. And and so it looks a little bit weird, but it definitely creates this 3D map. Yeah. And it's used in con it's it's used in things like not conservation. It's used for cars to detect lane-changing stuff, apparently. And like you're saying, it's used in GIS to do topography stuff. Yep. In conservation, it has a couple of years.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

We use it in the water utility industry, the they're starting to really expand on it for finding leaky pipes. Because you can't just constantly be we can't just constantly be digging up pipes all the time. You know what I mean? And so to be able to scan and see where those leaks actually are, it's been super beneficial, saving millions of gallons. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

So in conservation, which of course you were just saying that's water conservation. But otherwise, it was first used in forestry about 20 years ago. But applications for that quickly grew. But with forestry, it was used originally to measure canopy height, canopy density, and canopy coverage. So used in the plane, shooting down these lasers to measure all the tree stuff.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Okay, pause. Okay, pause. We've talked a thousand different times about how animals see different things and layers of light than what we do. I wonder if it's like a rave. Like if animals can pick it up and they're like boop boop boop like every night.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Yeah. Or just like you're out of nowhere and then or you know how like in movies, you know how C's their friend just has a red dot on their chest. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

The squirrels are like, oh, there's so many of them. Right?

SPEAKER_02 14:40

Hopefully they can't. Um create terrain models and measure landscape features such as slope, which is really good for modeling water flow, flood risk areas, and soil moisture content. And and now it can be used to it can be used to determine habitat quality and vegetation structure, which is a primary determinant of habitat quality for a lot of different species. So if you can determine the vegetation of an area, you can kind of get a good idea for if it's good or not for animals to live there because obviously they need a food source and a place for shelter. Yeah. Um so, and and things like how much standing dead wood is there, how much understory and shrubs, how much is actually trees. So now with the lasers, it's so sophisticated that it can do more than just tell how high a tree is. Now it can get all the way down to the bottom.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

And like just what kind of resources are there. It can also be used to create estimates of carbon stock. So where are the areas that are doing carbon sequestering based on topography? It can measure changes over time and how habitats have changed. Bathometric lidar can be used through bodies of water. So lasers that can do the same thing to make ocean floor maps and coral reefs. And then finally, which I also thought was crazy, newer lidar can even measure the differences in chlorophyll levels, helping to decidish deciduous. Oh my gosh, that's a whole sentence. Okay. To detect whether something is deciduous or coniferous. I don't know why I can't say it today. But anyway, it can detect how green, how green is it? That's gotta be a deciduous tree, that's gotta be an evergreen tree. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah, so then again, we can really look at habitat. And it's better than a camera, right? Because a satellite is just taking a flat image. It is not revealing anything underneath the canopy of a forest. Like it you see the trees, and that's it. The lasers are actually so tiny that they can go between leaves and twigs so it can see the vegetation on the forest floor, where a satellite just could not do that. That's crazy. Um, so yeah, LIDAR, very similar uses to yours, but very much focused on topography and vegetation and using lasers.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

That's pretty cool. Alrighty, I don't really have a really good segue into this next one. It's like the environmental DNA that's left behind. So, like CIS, right? Like wildlife CIS. Okay, okay. So, so again, I mean there's a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Because they're like, I was like, how is that tech? Oh yeah, duh. They're like analyzing it.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Yes, yes, yes, and trying to figure out. If you're looking at an area and you're trying to figure out if animals, a certain animal has been through there, you can either catch it, photograph it, evidence, hear it calling, see it with your own eyes. It's fairly limited until we started being able to really collect and analyze DNA. And I think people forget that us being able to really dive into and figure out, really figure out DNA is not all that old, the past 20-ish years. It's fairly recently, considering, I don't know, how old is some of this other stuff is that we're talking about. Yeah. Allows scientists then to be able to, I don't know, confirm that if animals are there without any other any other clue clues around, like no camera traps, no nothing.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

Or like with certainty, right? Because you could find fur, and I'm pretty good. I could probably tell you maybe two or three animals that could have left that fur. But I wouldn't know with certainty unless you did the DNA sampling. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

And DNA can tell you like male. I mean, like it's so many. Everything. Yeah, like everything. So it's not only just a picture of, oh yeah, that's a raccoon. It can basically tell you everything about that raccoon. That raccoon doesn't even know about that raccoon kind of situation. So while this all might sound kind of more science fiction, researchers have been using this technique since, again, I don't know, just before 2010 is whenever in wildlife it really started kicking off. In fact, one of the earlier studies that helped launch the field of e-DNA was published in by French researcher Pierre Tabaret and his colleagues showing that DNA left behind in the environment could be used to detect species without directly observing them, which is crazy. It's like a no-duh though. Yeah. But again, but again, if you couldn't prove it. Yeah, we couldn't prove it because you you think too about crime scenes, right? And everybody's like, look for DNA. But again, people forget that is a fairly recent thing. In the grand scheme of things, that's still fairly recent. Good DNA. Yes, good DNA to be able to see, but to be able to look at that DNA and be able to tell you who that individual is, to be able to process it. And again, because that always would take priority, you know, tracking wildlife was not a priority because why would it be? So every living thing leaves behind evidence. We know this, whether it realizes it or not, and because of the environmental DNA, we can collect it from skin cells, scales, feathers, mucus, saliva, urine, feces, literally anything and everything. And some of it lingers in the environment long enough for scientists to find it, and so they end up collecting it like water from a pond, soil from a forest, sediment from a river bottom. And even more recently, they've started to be able to collect DNA, like molecules, like I don't want to say floating in the air, but they've been able to yeah, but they've been able to take samples and you can see like the pollen and stuff in it, you know what I mean? And to be able to look at the DNA that way. So even stuff that we you don't really think of quote unquote DNA, they're looking at and pulling DNA from now, which is which is crazy. And again, because they can go ahead and bring those la those samples back to lab extract genetic material, you can basically find out from the DNA fragments anything and everything that you would need to know about that species. And here's an important distinction, I think, with all of this too, is that the scientists aren't collecting animals, so it's they're collecting traces of the animals that they've left behind. And so it's a lot less invasive, it's a lot longer term. And again, it's not darting it and collecting blood.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Yeah, exactly. Which again, I mean sometimes, but not. Yeah, sometimes, yeah. But yeah, you don't have to necessarily. Now, again, it's a matter of finding the DNA, because it's like, yeah, hey, do we have fox here? Now we gotta find the possibility.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

One of the articles we had to read for grad school was talking about wildlife corridors and whether or not they were effective. I don't know if you had to read the same one, but it was about how they were using barbed wire fur traps to catch fur from different bear species. Yeah. So bar like wire, bear would have to go under it, it snags the fur, then they would come and collect the fur and then do DNA analysis and they could find out, you know, how many species what species of bear, how many individuals, were they old, were they young, were they male, were they female? They could tell everyone.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

In relation they could say, in relation of between who's related to who. Is this like a lineage? Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

So they were seeing, right? Are they it was this is this highway making pockets of populations? How effective is the wildlife quarter? I mean, the applications for just this one study were so vast.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Yeah. So you brought up that example. So another one was even in 2011, there was a team led by David Gurday, I hope I'm saying that right, and they used environmental DNA to detect invasive Asian carp and water rays connected to the Great Lakes, which that was a really big deal. And so if you're not familiar with Asian carp, they're a group of invasive fish originally brought to the United States in the 70s. And since then they've spread through much of the Mississippi River basin, raised serious concerns about reaching the Great Lakes, where they could disrupt native fish communities and commercial fisheries because a lot of people depend on that. Yeah, very, very destructive. And the challenge wasn't finding a few fish in a massive waterways, which is incredibly difficult as it is, but finding their DNA ended up being a lot easier because they could just collect water samples, test for traces of Asian carp DNA, and they could detect whether there's evidence, yeah, that they were even there as hey, if this is an area that we should start looking at or not. So that which again, that to me is mind-blowing, that you could take some pond water and talk about everything at the end.

SPEAKER_02 23:04

Right, here's our right, we're finding where they're nature detectives.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 23:08

New age nature detectives, not trappers. You know.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Yeah. Another aquatic example is the Eastern Hellbender, which I know we've talked about hellbenders briefly before. The giant salamander, and then we kind of went off on a tangent with the hellbenders. But they're giant aquatic salamanders that can grow up to nearly two-ish feet. They're sometimes called snot otters, which I still think that's one of my favorite besides trash panda, snot otters is one of my favorite names. And the problem with hellbenders is they spend much of their time hidden beneath rocks and streams of rivers. Even if a population is healthy, they can be insanely difficult to find. And how do you right? And how do you find them? You have to go in, you have to flip up rocks, and they're very sensitive creatures. Right, you're ruining the stream as you're doing it. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So they're able to go ahead and go in and find and collect DNA samples, analyze it, and figure out all about the populations, health, all kinds of stuff. So anyway, so yeah, so animal DNA, like this is one that we obviously know a lot about DNA. We because of all the advances within humans and looking at human genomes and and all that. We just talked what two weeks ago about all that, but like the animal side of stuff is I don't want to say it's lacking because it's not, it's just a little bit behind. So it's like we wasn't priority, like you were saying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

We had to prioritize some stuff first, and then now the technology is so proliferous, and so many more people have access to it.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

Yeah, so it makes it a whole lot easier. It's just got to be one of these things of hey, this is all the stuff we can use it for. Who would have thought to be like, oh yeah, we can collect a sample and then find all the DNA just within a water sample kind of thing? You know what I mean? To figure out where the the carp are. So there's really endless possibilities. I you know, I didn't even talk about all the examples that they're going in through jungles and and and scat and like right. There's just tons of like good applications that we can leave these more sensitive areas a little bit more alone. Yes, we want to still take pictures and things like that because it's you know, it doesn't disturb them, but having all that DNA is insanely beneficial and just really cool. So the applications for that are definitely growing. And like Laura said, the more that people have access to these things, it's becoming I don't know, like more on the forefront of oh, well, let's just look for DNA, rather than saying, well, let's go trap a bunch of them, you know. And Laura said, like dart them, collect samples, it's completely different. So that really has changed the game of conservation, and e DNA is gonna continue to change like the how we're studying animals for a long, insanely long time.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Yeah, that's so cool. Well, my next one is also talking about something that's uninvasive is passive acoustic monitoring. It's something that I'm weirdly into, and I have been ever since we got that bat echo meter when we worked at Little Rock. So funny. Um so passive acoustic monitoring is using recording hardware combined with machine learning algorithms. So you're using portable, remote, weatherproof sensors that record sound. The recorders are non-invasive and usually camouflaged because they want to be hidden, and they can be left for really long periods of time collecting large amounts of data over time. Then once the data is collected on the machine, it's usually analyzed with specific computer programming used like in tandem with that device, which can isolate the animal communication from the background noise and also identify patterns and species. So again, recorders, they're not new. Yeah. They're recorders mixed with computer modeling. Yeah. Game changer. Yeah, craziness. Because of what can be identified with patterns and things like that. So, how is it used for conservation? It is a huge range of uses. It can track specific species, which is probably the main thing it's often used for. So it can detect and track the distribution, abundance, and even behavior of different species of wildlife. The behavior part is really cool because it isn't being influenced by human presence. If you're just passively doing it, you're not seeing the behavior, but you are hearing the behavior. So any kind of communication you're hearing. And it can be done over really big areas all at one time. So let's say you wanted to monitor a population of, you know, that had a really big territory like wolves. You could put a couple different monitors around, they're constantly recording this data. You don't have to have scientists out there for long periods of time over big distances.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:45

Um, and it's especially w useful when looking at endangered species or indicator species, because endangered ones are hard to find, right? So you're saying it's much easier to do it when you're just passively grabbing DNA. This is just easier when you can just leave a monitor out there and hope it eventually finds this endangered species. And then indicator species are ones that presence or absence indicates something about the environment. If they're there, it's good. If they're not there, it's bad. So if all of a sudden, you know, you've been hearing frogs in this area this whole time, if you stop hearing frog song on your recorder, there's an issue. So it's analyzing habitat health and not just one specific species. We're also talking about soundscape ecology, which I think is such a cool like which so cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the sound of an entire area. So soundscape ecology, the living sound of this of the whole area, and it's the relationship between living organisms, humans, and their environment. It's its own field of study. So it's looking at how much biodiversity is in there, like how many different sounds are we hearing? Is the sound changing over time? Does the sound change seasonally? What is all of this telling you? So it's just people's job to listen to sounds. And you can go online and find different soundscapes of different places and then look at patterns over time. It's also really good at detecting illegal activity. So if you're recording and you're trying to find endangered species and all of a sudden you hear a chainsaw in the background, bam, busted. You know what I mean? Or poaching, like gunshots. So all of that data then can then help with land and wildlife management decisions. If something's there, if not something's there. What's wrong with the habitat? How is it changing? Um where should we where should we do prescribed burns that will do the least amount of problems? Where should we be building houses? Not here, because there's a whole bunch of animals, you know. And it's again, we've been saying with a lot of these, the tech is better than just doing it with visual monitoring. It's way easier to detect some species by sound than sight, like small things like frogs, birds, and bats. It's more cost effective than paying a biologist hourly. Right? Way less habitat disturbance, allows monitoring to happen in multiple locations at the same time and creates a permanent record, which, like you were saying with the bird radar, we can all go birding and we can have our own mental click, remember that bird, but that's not a permanent record that scientists everywhere can use. So this sound is a permanent record of that time and place. And so, with that in mind, I want you all after this podcast to go check out Wildlife Acoustics, which is a company. They have amazing products. Katie and I have both used them before at the zoo with that bat meter. But what's really I used them before that, and that's how I found out.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

Oh, right. Yeah, bats work and I'll show you. Yeah, we used them because we had such a variety of species that would come through that we had to do a census on all the different varieties of species that were there because that we didn't really, really know. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

And so, but not only are their products cool. So if you're a scientist, you should definitely check them out. But just if you're a lay person who's interested, I have subscribed to their newsletter and they have free webinars regularly where scientists give talks on their projects that they used the monitors for. And I did one, the whole theme was Star Wars based. Like the titles were Star Wars based, which was silly. Yeah. But it was all of these cool different one person was studying eagle owls over in Europe using them, and so they were talking about how they were using them in a quarry to determine where these eagle owls were nesting, and then somebody else was talking about how they were using them to do endangered frogs. So if you're just interested in that kind of stuff, free webinar, baby. So check out wildlife acoustics.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Very cool. Alrighty. I have one more, you have one more, right? Okay. Alright, so the last one that I'm gonna talk about. I don't know. I think I knew about this in concept, but I had no freaking clue on what it was or what it was called. So we open up and we start talking about fallow. So some of these animals that places and organizations track, whales, think of like the huge migrators, right? The whales that are going from south to north, some of albatross, some of the birds that are literally going from pole to pole every year migrating. How the heck do we really track those other than radar? Because right, radars have to have points, you know, along that path and has to go out, touch, come back, okay. But that's not really effective because then you would have to have points, you know, the whole way. So, how are we tracking those animals? It can't be a normal GPS call or radio tag, because again, it's very short term and it's limited. So that's wherever the Icarus program has come in. Icarus. Icarus, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

No, I only know that because of the that it's gotta be that, because it's the the guy who flew too close to the sun.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

Yes, yes, yes, the Greek guy. Yeah, the Greek mythology. And it's not that, but it is that's where it comes from, and it stands for the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

What? I have never heard of such a thing. Right?

SPEAKER_00 33:04

Right? The project was originally proposed by German zoologist Martin Wilinsky, a researcher who has spent much of his career trying to understand animal movement and migration. His idea was simple animals are constantly collecting information about the world around them just by living their lives. But the challenge has with the huge migrators has always been figuring out how to follow them. So working with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and a large international team of collaborators, Wolinski helped develop a system that would eventually be installed aboard the International Space Station in 2018. Yep. That's cool. The basic concept is surprisingly straightforward. Scientists attach small electronic tags to animals that are way more lightweight than radio callers or anything like that. They're solar powered. And those tags can record all kinds of information, including location, movement, activity levels, temperature, acceleration, even.

SPEAKER_02 34:04

And is this what they're like jamming like a stick? Is this the same thing as the tag? I've seen videos before of them tagging a whale with a stick and they stick something in it.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

I would have to see, I would have to see exactly what that is. Because some of them are just the old school like G-tracking or telemetry or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is this is way different from space. Yeah. And so as that tag is collecting the data while the animal goes about its normal life, as the International Space Station passes overhead, traveling around the earth roughly what, 17,000 plus miles per hour, the station can then receive information about from those tags and relay it back to scientists. So it's almost like Yeah, so it's almost like a constant snapshot, right? So whatever the bird does, um, and I think I talk about it here in a minute, but it's 90 minutes. Every 90 minutes, the space station can go around. So you figure every 90 minutes, it's like whatever the bird has done that last 90 minutes is collected in that tracker, and then as soon as the you know, International Space Station goes over top, it's like and it sends all that information up to them, and then you can kind of like backtrack where they are to predict where they're going, kind of thing. And so why would scientists go through all the trouble putting wildlife tracking system on the International Space Station? Well, like I said before, scientists have been using tracking devices for decades, GPS callers, radio transmitters, satellite tags, even. And those tools truly have revolutionized wildlife research, but they also have limitations. Batteries only last so long, transmitting data takes energy. Many animals travel enormous distances across landscapes that are difficult or sometimes impossible for researchers to fall truly follow the whole way. And so that's where space becomes surprisingly useful. And so, because it circles Earth every 90 minutes, passing over huge portions of the planet, of course, um, it means that researchers aren't limited to tracking animals in one country, one region, or even one continent. They can follow migrations across international borders, animals moving across oceans, bird traveling thousands of miles between breeding and wintering grounds. And instead of studying one small piece of the journey, scientists can start to see the bigger picture of the whole. Because they don't have to, hey, let's track these birds as it goes through South America. And then next year it's well, let's take this middle journey. You know what I mean? Because you always had to kind of like split it up. Or yeah, where now it's nope, let's just track it the whole way. And so once you start to see the whole journey, you start finding answers to questions that scientists have been asking for years. For example, researchers have used tracking technology to follow migratory cuckoos traveling between Europe and Africa. These studies have revealed important stopover location where birds rest and refuel during migration, which, like I said earlier, helps us to protect those hot spots of where they're gonna relax. And researchers have also tracked fruit bats you know moving across distances, like we said, whales, I mean, anything. And so, yeah, no, it is it is really cool. Um, and so here's the part though where Martin Wikwikkowski, I hope I'm saying the last name, who knows, and many other researchers have found really exciting is that scientists just aren't just learning about animals, they're learning more and more about the earth itself because animals are constantly responds to responding to changes in the environment. So storms, droughts, wildfires, habitat loss, changes in food availability. So the animals aren't studying the environment per se, they're living in it, which sometimes makes them to be the first ones to notice change. And so this the scientist and his team at the university have been describing animals as living environmental, yeah, like environmental sensors, but because they're the ones that are like if a flock of birds suddenly changes migration route, there has to be a reason for that, right? Yeah, and so they can go back and study and see, okay, why is it shifting? Why is it doing this versus that? So it's not just a snapshot of the animal, which is extremely important, or that flock or that like big group. It's also helping us to see like major changes in the earth too, which is really, really cool.

SPEAKER_02 38:19

So you were your tech was looking at the big picture. Mine is gonna be looking up close and personal. So we're gonna end it on animatronic spy cameras. Because I just think they're so cool. Yeah, it is pretty cool. Um, also known as spy creatures, probably most well known from the spy in the wild series on PBS.

SPEAKER_00 38:37

If you don't know, I was gonna say it's really watch it. Yeah, it's if anything, it is so funny. For me, this is by far the funniest one.

SPEAKER_02 38:46

Because it's all right, how are we gonna get up close and personal with these? Yeah. So we've done passive monitoring. This is as active as you can get without dressing up in a suit, right? Yes. This is we want to be there in the action. No, no passive monitoring. Trying to be as in a non-invasive as possible, but um so these animatronic spy cameras are robotic devices that mimic both the appearance and behavior of real animals in order to record wildlife in their natural habitat.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

So, what does that look like? For me, that's what makes it so much funnier because it's it's co like to obviously to a human eye, you're like, what the heck is it? Yeah, it's just really funny. You guys need to be.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

Yeah, right. Is it like that's just Fred? Yeah, is it a little different?

SPEAKER_01 39:41

Is it Becky from finding Dory, or is it yeah?

SPEAKER_02 39:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:46

They're just like, ah, that one's just a little different. A little off.

SPEAKER_02 39:49

Yeah, a little off. Well, so the scientists have to have a conversation of like first they gotta decide on a species, and then once they do decide on a species, the designers need to create a creature that looks like that species, can function in that environment, and can obtain their desired video and audio. So there's a lot of moving parts here. It's a pretty complicated process. So it has to look the part, sculptors make the model, skin fabrication experts make the external structures, and animatronic and robot designers create the internal movement structures. So it's a lot of design and engineering and art going into this.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Then it has to act like the real animal. It needs to swim, walk, crawl, whatever, depending on the environment that it lives in. And I'll talk about more in a minute of how that's done. But for example, one of the examples that I was reading about is they made one that was a gorilla, and they made it so that it would avert its eyes from the silverback to show and and and they did a hippo that wiggled its ears to show that it wasn't a threat. So it's like gotta act like the animal. It just like it just designed me. Yeah, yeah. Um it has to be able to, and it has to be able to record stuff. The whole point of it is being a camera, so it's gotta have a camera, and usually it has microphones too.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:03

And it has to work remotely because again, this is an ace ventura with the rhino. You know.

SPEAKER_00 41:10

Yes. Yes. I I and again, I'm not knocking PBS because it is a really interesting show, but the the length and effort that you go to for this, you know what I mean, to make this happen is just insane the amount of effort that goes into it. Continues. So much.

SPEAKER_02 41:26

And so these engineers, called puppeteers when they're doing this, so the puppeteers control the movements from afar. These animatronic engineers consult animal behavior specialists to know what to do, right? Because they're not necessarily animal people, they're engineers or artists. So they have to be in a partnership with these scientists. So they like consulted a great ape specialist to be like, how do they move? Tell us everything about behavior because we have to be convincing. Crazy. Yeah, because it's super complicated. So the audio and video that these spy creatures capture is instrumental in understanding species-specific behavior. So, as corny as it is, we're gaining quite a bit of insight. Yeah, it works. It works. So the more the more we understand about a species and how it fits into the ecosystem, the better scientists can make these informed decisions on how to manage and conserve that species and the surrounding ecosystem. Yeah. It can provide insight into habitat loss, poaching, and other conservation issues while they're filming. So again, if they're filming and they notice illegal activity or somebody tries to take out one of these poor little animatronic spy sales.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

Right? Imagine you come up across the gorilla in the wow, like a poacher. You'd be like, what it what like so convicted.

SPEAKER_02 42:38

Or one of these little guys just ends all of a sudden a black bag goes over the head of whatever this camera is. This the puppeteer's like, you know, it's been it's been creature napped. Yeah. And so why these cameras, not just a regular camera, not just a person dressed up, or just a scientist walking up to the group. It isn't passive like a camera trap. So a puppeteer can deliberately follow, investigate, or try and observe specific animals and their behavior. It's not just, oh man, the deer wandered past the camera. This is like we're following the deer, right? You can actively monitor.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

We're blending in, guys. We're blending in.

SPEAKER_02 43:15

Smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave. Smile and wave. Yeah. And you can capture behaviors that might otherwise literally never be seen. Um it can record in areas that can be dangerous or difficult for humans, not just the environment, but political instability. Send in the robots, right? You can't actually send in the scientists. Species like hippos, too dangerous or nocturnal. Right. Yeah. You know, nobody wants to get that close. And these high-tech robots are really appealing to a wider audience of people, connecting people with wildlife that might not normally be interested. It's hard not to make a connection with these silly little animatronic creatures. Like you're invested. You know? Yeah. And the footage that they get, it's so special and so close. It feels like you're right there. And again, it provides that emotional connection. So this is really good for documentaries. Yes. If you want people to care about wildlife, this is the kind of footage that you need. Well, you're seeing the behavior. You're seeing the mom taking care of the baby. Yeah. You're there with them.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

Well, it it it it's it's more like you said you said it a few minutes ago. Like it's it's drastically more appealing to a broader audience where everything that you and I have talked up until this point, like we geek out on it because it's really cool. But this kind of stuff hits everybody else who normally isn't deep diving into all this stuff and appreciated maybe. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

But you need that. You need that. Right. People need to make emotional connections to care. And if that's the way it's gotta be done, then that's the way it's gotta be done. So if a person is like, I need funding for this species, if they can get footage of that species and make people care about them, that can translate to funding and other things. And then they can use the other tech that we've talked about to do their research, but first they need the money.

SPEAKER_00 45:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

All right, guys. Well, that's animal technology. That was a that was a fun one. I I at least have a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 45:12

Yeah, that's normal or that we know a lot about. Yeah, this was just different. I learned some cool stuff.

SPEAKER_00 45:17

Yeah, some very different stuff. All right, guys. Well, that is all for this episode. We'll have another short episode, mini episode next week. Until then, go check us out on Patreon. I've been trying to post a little bit more like long content, un you know, edited as much content over there, too. So go check that stuff out, and we will talk to you next week.