Scientists are making some unusual recruits in their efforts to predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other natural phenomena. They are enrolling thousands of dogs, goats and other farmyard animals – as well as a wide variety of wildlife – in studies that will monitor their movements from space.
The program uses small transmitters that are fitted to mammals, birds and insects. The detailed movements of these creatures will then be monitored from a dedicated satellite to be launched next year.
The aim is not only to study how they react to threatening natural events such as volcanic eruptions, but to gain new insights into migration, the spread of disease among animals and the impact of the climate crisis, researchers say.
“Ultimately, we hope to launch a fleet of about six satellites and establish a global observation network that will not only provide details of wildlife movements and animal health across the planet, but will reveal how creatures respond to natural phenomena such as earthquakes,” he said. said the project leader. , Martin Wikelski, of the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany.
The value of studying tagged animals in the latter area had already been demonstrated in early experiments in Sicily on the slopes of Mount Etna, Wikelski said last week. “We found that the behavior of goats is quite good at predicting large volcanic eruptions.”
Sensors have shown the animals become nervous before an eruption and refuse to move to higher pastures they would normally like to visit. “They know in advance what is coming. We don’t know how they do it, but they do,” Wikelski said.
Similarly, researchers monitored dogs, sheep and other farm animals in the Abruzzo mountains outside Rome and found that they also responded in ways that predicted seven out of eight major earthquakes in the region over the past 12 years.
Stories of animals that behave strangely before earthquakes or eruptions are not new. The Greek historian Thucydides claimed that rats, dogs, snakes and weasels left the city of Helice just before an earthquake in 373 BC.
Similarly, the 1975 Haicheng earthquake in China occurred after snakes and rats were seen leaving their burrows.
Why this animals behaved like that is less clear. “During the build-up to an earthquake, tectonic plates slide over each other under enormous pressure, and this throws ions from the rocks into the air. The animals may react to that,” said Wikelski, the founder of the International collaboration for animal research using space (Icarus), an international collaboration involving teams of scientists around the world.
Icarus became possible because of a revolution in branding technology. Small digital transmitters – with tiny lithium batteries – and cheap and plentiful miniscule GPS devices have made it possible to make tags weighing just a few grams.
“We’re going from where we couldn’t really detect most vertebrate species on the planet to turning it around,” said University of Michigan ecologist Scott Yanco MIT Technology Review. “We are now able to detect most things.”
Understanding how creatures respond to geological changes is only one area of interest in that revolution, Wikelski added. “For example, we can investigate the health of wildlife from space,” he said.
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An example is provided by electronic ear tags – equipped with tiny 30g accelerometers – attached to wild boars. From changes in an animal’s movements, it shows that if a pig develops African swine fever – a highly contagious virus – it spreads easily between wild boars and domestic pigs.
Knowing when a disease outbreak occurs in the wild can be important in limiting the disease’s impact on farms, say researchers. “This is a game changer for wildlife disease monitoring,” said Kevin Morelle, a scientist based at the Max Planck Institute.
The technology should also help scientists understand the processes that drive migrations. Transmitters are fitted to creatures as small as dead-headed weevils, and their movements may soon reveal the mysteries behind the 2,000-mile migrations they make between Europe and Africa each year.
“Similarly, we will be able to study animal populations to determine how they respond to habitat changes caused by global warming,” Wikelski said.
Icarus was originally scheduled to be fully operational a few years ago when the team began working with Russian scientists to install a radio telescope on the International Space Station to monitor tagged animals. “After the invasion of Ukraine, we decided to stop that cooperation,” said Wikelski.
As a replacement, the team built a small satellite called the Icarus CubeSat, which will be launched next year. “After that, we will scale up our operations until we have about six CubeSats and a permanent system to monitor animals as they move and migrate around the world,” Wikelski said. “This should provide us with a large amount of data about the way animals behave.”
