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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else get bothered seeing wild animals tagged like that? I recall watching a documentary where they were tagging rhinos and elephants for “conservation” purposes, but oops some of them suffocated during tranquilization. Even if everything goes perfectly, it still feels like a massive invasion of privacy, and it’s pretty clear the animals really do not like it given how hard they’ll try to remove them.

I’ll eat my fair share of farmed meat so maybe I should just keep my mouth shut, yet I remain bothered seeing wild animals forced into a constantly monitored and physically uncomfortable situation.

Perhaps my concerns could be alleviated by papers showing direct positive outcomes for the species under observation?

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I would be astonished if they had a concept of privacy that could be violated by a tracking device, and even more astonished if they could somehow deduce that the device is actually sending invisible rays that contain information about their whereabouts to humans. Moreover, I've seen no evidence that tracking devices in general cause discomfort or stress, or that animals tend to try hard to remove them, before these magpies. Indeed that would defeat the whole purpose of a tracking device by changing the animal's behavior, which is why they're obviously designed so as to minimize any such change in behavior.

Given that birds exhibit magnetoreception, it's not outside the realms of probability that they could sense EM radiation

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception

Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked? Honest question, I know some developers will give an unequivocal “yes” to the above.

As for the discomfort, I don’t have a link but it was a Love Nature episode focused on rhinos. They stated they needed to invest in heavy duty materials affixed to the horn by drilling through it otherwise the rhinos would remove the device. In the same episode a rhino died of suffocation after the tranquilizer knocked them unconscious in an undesirable position, and the verdict was that such occurrences were unavoidable costs of doing business.

> Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked?

Not OP, but:

Even speaking as a strict vegan, there's a pretty big difference between a human having not thought about privacy much, and an animal that literally has different conceptual experiences of the world. I really don't see the equivalence.

It's like getting upset about a cat walking into the bathroom while their owner is pooping; these are creatures with completely different mental models of the world and to me part of respecting animals is not trying to force all of their mental models through a human framework. Again speaking as a vegan, that doesn't mean we can just ignore their experiences of the world or that we should be fine with causing them physical or mental pain, but I really don't believe there is any conceptual mapping between modern human privacy notions and animal privacy.

If people want to argue the devices are causing discomfort or that it's risky to trap/tag the birds without injuring them, then fine, those are different arguments. If they want to argue that magpies in specific do have some kind of mental model of privacy or norm that we're violating, then they can make that argument as well (although I suspect there isn't any real evidence for that). But no, I don't believe that it's violating their privacy to watch them, and I don't think that a human who is being secretly tracked or who hasn't thought much about privacy is the equivalent to a magpie's internal model of the world.

At the very least, if we're going to talk about mental torture for an animal, that conversation should be framed around what we know about the animal's point-of-view, not based around what a human would feel. A lot of mental harm has been caused by us assuming that animals just work the same way that humans do, and in using that assumption to decide that certain actions towards them are good or bad based purely on what we would feel in their position.

Interesting. I'll admit this isn't my area, and as a hymenopterologist I'm really only an interested amateur in any case; I will say that I've never observed any wasp to be obviously dismayed by my camera flashes, and only once even by my presence - a bald-faced yellowjacket who was surprised to find me inches away upon emerging from a flower where she'd been nectaring, and circled my head a few times before zipping off about her occasions.

But then, on the other hand, I'm not really interfering with them, and certainly not attaching a semi-permanent tracker - the most you ever see in that direction with wasps is a dab of paint on the dorsal thorax, as with queen bee marking, which if perhaps not perfectly innocuous is still certainly much less intrusive than the devices typically applied to mammals and in this case at least to birds.

Can you cite the claim that the subjects of tracking studies typically find the trackers innocuous?

Somewhat embarrassingly, I was wrong about wasps and radio tracking! Some sparrow wasps (V. mandarinia) were tagged with transmitters as a means of locating a nest in Washington state about a year and a half ago, the first nest known to exist in the US. (1)

Granted, with the objective of locating the nest being in this case its extirpation, that the tracker should be innocuous would be of secondary concern in this case. However, rendering the tracked wasps unable to fly would somewhat defeat the purpose, so one assumes it was designed not to interfere too much with their activities - a difficulty no doubt ameliorated by these wasps' unmatched size and strength.

I'd like to read the paper undoubtedly since published by the entomologists involved, but haven't the time just now to find it. But speaking of finding things - given how late in the year that nest was located, it's very probable that any mated gynes to whom it had given rise had dispersed from the nest and possibly entered diapause before the nest was found. Between that and the sparrow wasp's relatively reclusive nesting habit, while this was the first nest known to exist in the US, it's almost certain not to be the last.

(1) https://www.geekwire.com/2020/using-radio-trackers-scientist...

> hymenopterologist

Had to look that one up. Wasn’t sure if it was a joke from high school or a real field. The latter, for those interested - bees, wasps, and such.

It's a specialization of entomology, yes. That said, and to the point of your initial uncertainty, there has long been question over the presence of the "hymen-" radical in the family name Hymenoptera ("-ptera" meaning "winged", cf. Orthoptera "straight-winged", Hemiptera "half-winged", Lepidoptera "jewel-winged", etc., and also eg Chiroptera "hand-winged" for bats.) It's confidently understood to derive from the name of a Greek god of marriage, as does the name of a more widely known mammalian membrane, but no one is entirely certain why that radical was used here.

It was previously thought that "hymeno-" referred to the membranous nature of the hymenopteran wing, but this doesn't make much sense given that all insect wings are membranous to some extent; a name in that sense would not differentiate the family, and thus be a relatively unlikely choice even on the part of a classical taxonomist. Currently the radical is understood instead to refer to the fashion in which hymenopterans' rear wings can lock into the forewings via a series of small hooks, in order to both support the mechanics of flight and allow bees and wasps to narrowly fold their wings along their backs where they do not obstruct entry into narrow spaces such as brood burrows and nest cells. This feature, which is distinctive to hymenopterans, could very reasonably have inspired the family name Hymenoptera, meaning "married-winged".

correction: Lepidoptera is correctly "scale-winged". What I get for relying on memory rather than checking the etymology for the name of a family I rarely study...

Interesting. My roots are weak, but I saw "opt" and thought of "opto" not breaking it into ptera. Thanks for the information.

I agree they likely have no knowledge or concept of privacy, but just wanted to point out:

> astonished if they could somehow deduce that the device is actually sending invisible rays that contain information about their whereabouts

The fact that the victim is unaware does not excuse the crime!

If a human walked out on the street after forgetting his pants, is it a crime if I look at him?

Show me an animal that prefers to wear clothes and I'll start considering it's privacy.

Look all you want, but maybe draw the line somewhere before “shoot them with a tranquilizer dart and glue a gps transmitter to them while they’re passed out”

In the US, a lot of wildlife conservation work involves trapping and tagging wild animals. I listen to a popular hunting podcast where wildlife biologists are often brought on as guests, and a LOT of the information they get seems to be directly from GPS collars. Science is the primary and proper tool for wildlife management policy under the North American Model of conservation, and GPS collars are the primary way of tracking things like mortality, migration, etc. that inform such science.

The main thing to remember is that, practically speaking, conservation is about a population, not the individuals within the population. The point isn't to save the individual deer, rather the point is to make sure that 100 years from now, deer are still around. This is how things like the the Pittman-Robertson Act are justified -- funding wildlife conservation from tag/license sales to hunters to kill wildlife. The results (the foundation of arguably the most successful wildlife restoration programs in human history, responsible for bringing dozens of major species back from near-extinction) speak for themselves.

Elephants and Rhinos are endangered due to poaching and habitat destruction, some on an extremely critical level. I'm sure conservationists would rather not tag them, but given the alternative might be extinction, what else is there to do?

For birds when they are trapped and banded they are not tranquilized, typically they can be placed in a sock or otherwise wrapped up to restrain them and keep them calm, so the chances of them dying or getting hurt are very low. I’ve been involved in several bird banding outings and never saw a bird get hurt or die. The privacy thing is another issue I’ll leave to other experts.

One example of tethered animals that have a choice are falcons and other raptors that are tied to a perch during the day when they are not being flown. These birds usually return to their handlers at the end of a display (admittedly food is involved) and submit to be being re-perched. Either they have appallingly bad memories or don't mind the perch, which is understandable given that many of them are sprint predators who when fed would naturally perch in a tree for hours.

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