Lightweight radio transmitters on birds, bats and insects | Hacker News Reader

Lightweight radio transmitters on birds, bats and insects

smithsonianmag.com

69 pointssohkamyung21 comments

A friend is in involved in the sat based version. They did manage incredible optimizations for power efficiency.

With a clock, pressure sensor, light sensor, a low power radio you can, and a bit of compute you can:

  * Use sunrise/sunset to get an idea of your longitude
  * Use the length of the day get an idea of your latitude 
  * Then use the above and some orbital calculations to find a 1-2 minute window when the sat will be visible.
  * Use the sat communications to upload a few 100 bytes and update your local clock, and get a better idea of your longitude.

Such optimizations would allow a 1-2 gram transmitter to last for months to a year.

> In looking at roost networks of bank swallows in Ontario you can identify that, “Oh, some bank swallows at night are actually going to different roosts from where their babies are,” and the adults will often trade off. We don’t know why, but they will sort of wander around and travel a hundred or more kilometers to a different place between nights.

That is actually pretty surprising to me. The weirdest insight from animal trackers I’d previously heard was kind of similar—that wolves regularly travel a lot further than scientists would have expected—but trading off roosts is a whole different level.

AirBnBird.

https://www.lotek.com/products/nanopin/

https://www.lotek.com/products/nanotags/

https://www.lotek.com/products/solar-nanotags-coded-vhf-for-...

These trackers on the legs remind of the 70 year old albatross https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38662454 which has the same tracker.

For some reason, I immediately thought "no way that bird is 70 years old", and reasoned that the bauble on the birds leg is now a status symbol.

After all, all the other birds see humans staring, pointing, admiring the bird with it!

So the bird returning for 70 years, is just whichever bird that managed to kill and take the bauble for its own. I envision a bird arena, and Spock/Kirk fight music, all of it.

And here we just think it's the same bird.

That's not reason, that's post-facto rationalization.

The two are often conflated, to the detriment of us all.

Hey now, don't have too much fun without the rest of us

Does anyone have more in-depth technical details on these trackers? I assume they are UHF transmitters that require directional scanners?

Been bothered for a long time that wildlife conservationists are so quick to tag animals with labels and trackers left and right. Is it really helping, or is it rather control freakery and actionism when the natural habitat or food chain or whatever is simply shrinking and there's not much that can be done about it save for full-on stopping obvious causes? Can not at least animal identities and movement be tracked or estimated with minimal-invasive methods or cameras more intelligently?

Most of the time, tags don't seem to cause much problems but sometimes there can be some effects [1].

Conservation efforts can be effective if evidence is needed in order to fight against further land destruction (such as property development), especially when migratory birds use small but important areas for stopovers.

On the other hand, a lot of conservation research is merely clarifying somewhat obvious problems, but the current capitalistic system is very inefficient when it comes to dealing with these problems: in it, you must hit people over the head with the obvious, because people are more attached to money than preserving our ecosystems. If we were smart, we could do more with much less research.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3802820

You can't solve what you can't measure.

Again, a false dichotomy. The state of many animals is already well known enough, and the problems they face is well known enough. The debate isn't whether to measure or not, but how much measurement occurs and how it reflects the poor state of how conservation works -- which is not the fault of conservationists of course.

The implicit argument you are making is that something has to be measurable to be worth saving. The most important things in the world you cant measure.

It helps establish where the habitat/range of the animal actually is. For animals that move around a lot that can be difficult. For example a group of bats may fly down a particular corridor to get to a feeding site. You can establish the habitat for particular animals and improve understanding for the species as a whole to improve prediction.

This understanding is all useful in adjusting human activity to reduce impact. Or at least understanding what that impact may be.

There is some research near me using tags on bats to see if their cross sea migration is affected by wind farms. Cameras clearly wont work.

TIL bats migrate. https://www.batcon.org/flight-of-the-night/

How do you prove or disprove that airports mess with migration patterns?

Wind farms?

Loss of forests?

Loss of wetlands?

Making the world friendly to animals means providing areas where they can feed, reproduce, be safe, drink uncontaminated water, migrate safely, etc. There are costs to accommodating them and nobody is going to want to pay without knowing what positive impact will result.

They are missing a huge chance by not using ultra cheap SDRs like RTLSDRs.

Edit: I see.. they are using RasPis. But it looks like a super complex setup.

https://archived.sensorgnome.org/How_do_I_build_a_SensorGnom...

This is using a Funcube Dongle, which if I recall has much better noise performance than the normal RTLSDR devices.

they do support RTL-SDR https://docs.motus.org/en/stations/station-equipment/antenna...

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