Scientists develop 'backpack' computers to track wild animals in hard-to-reach habitats
To see is to believe. Understanding animal species could be hard, but through observing their behavior and social networks in the wild could open doors that will help us understand them more.
Researchers were able to make a new technology -described on April 2 in PLOS Biology- a tracker that will record tiny animals that fly around in the sky and crowd together in caves and hollow trees. This observation is made possible by attaching little backpacks to them with glue.
The Backpack Tracker
These high technology backpacks provided data for the famous study published in last year's Halloween, showing that vampire bats maintain the social bond they have developed during their captivity. These backpacks can communicate with each other and act as ground-based receivers.
It is a wireless network similar to what we can find in our smartphones, such as motion detectors, and Bluetooth-style connectivity but much lighter and energy saving. A team of engineers, computer scientists, and biologists are behind this extraordinary technology.
The backpack trackers made to be exceptionally lightweight and small because usual equipment like necklaces or harnesses used in tracking large animals would not work for bats or small animals.
That is why the size and weight of the tracker were critical to the success of tracking vampire bats that weigh 1 to 1.5 pounds and could grow to 3 ½ inches in length.
More so, using backpacks on bats save weight and make sure that the sensors fall off quickly so that bats would not have to carry the burden of additional weight while flying around for extended periods, said Simon Ripperger, lead author of the research paper and a postdoctoral scholar in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University.
The researchers retrieve the sensors and try to recycle the backpacks if they can because these often get scratched off by the bats' roost within two weeks. They then recharge the batteries so they can use it again.
Also Read: How to Choose a SMS Tracker?
BATS and GPS
Although the study describes and focuses on testing the tracker's effectiveness on bats, Ripperger said that it also works for other animals. Examples are birds, rodents, reptiles, and amphibians. That is why the team of researchers called it the Broadly Applicable Tracking System or BATS.
Ripperger used to rely on radio-telemetry, and describing his experience as a time-consuming, exhausting, and inaccurate method.
Fortunately, he received support from the German equivalent of the National Science Foundation. Together with the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, where he was a postdoc scholar at the time and many German universities, they were able to make a better system.
It took them seven years to come up with the highest performance network possible using ultra-low levels of energy, which only has a capacity of 5 percent of an AAA battery's capacity.
This tiny technology of accelerometers and the proximity sensor- to record the bat's movement and to show when they are close to each other respectively- is all enclosed in each 3D printed plastic backpack that weighs less than a penny.
The tracker is usually turned off, and only turns on when they receive a signal from another bat. The researcher built a series of base stations on the ground that pick up the signals and record the bats' social activities and flight trajectories, then broadcasting the data every two seconds.
Ripperger describes BATS as the most efficient way of tracking small animals, while GPS is used for tracking animals on a grander scale. A GPS will not be able to record a bat's social behavior when it goes inside the cave, but BATS can collect signals in places where GPS cannot.
Also Read: Bat Genes Could Be The Key in Developing Covid-19 Cure: Study
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