GPS to track walruses

Danish scientists will use GPS technology to track walruses by satellite. Researchers plan to implant tiny tracking devices in the animals' thick hides. These devices emit a signal whenever a walrus climbs out of the water. The scientists will use these signals to track walrus migration. The public will even be able to watch the day-to-day progression of the walruses online. [BBC]

Comments

[Philip Brooks]

After reading the first sentence of this post in my RSS aggregator, I couldn't stop laughing for almost a minute. It was so absurd-sounding and out of the blue.

[Njorl]

Are any of the walrusses sex offenders?

[dejah]

Wow. I've got to get away from the computer. The first thing I THOUGHT I read was "GPS to track waitresses."

and then I thought, "what a great idea!"

(This after waiting an hour for a "quick burger" a few days back when our waitress decided to take a break and forgot about us.)

(Not that all wait staff are like that... )

[twig]

We should also track the people who are stealing walrus buckets.

[Dr. Wu]

Let's hope that the walrus' locations aren't reported all that accurately--otherwise we'll have armed yahoos "geocaching" for walri on the high seas.

[CatManDu]

I for one welcome our new walrus overlords.

[global yokel]

I'm a walrus, and I intend to file suit for invasion of pricacy.

[coturnix]

But,will it work in the mountains?

[cfrost]

All that technology that brought you cell phones, blackberries, digital cameras, laptops, etc., has been applied to field biology and has revolutionized the field. I, for instance, am currently working with a project that is using acoustic transmitters implanted in juvenile salmon along with arrays of hydrophones to determine the three dimensional tracks (within inches) of fish passing through hydroelectric facilities on the Columbia River. This in a river that is flowing through turbines and spillways at 200 to 300 thousand cubic feet per second and more.

Wild animals can be tracked and monitored in places and under conditions that were heretofore not just impossible, but inconceivable. Monitor an elephant seal’s heart rate at 4000 feet down in the middle of the North Pacific; figure out exactly how large a bat’s foraging range is; determine the winter range of eiders in arctic waters, locate rattlesnake hybernaculae; whatever; it’s possible now. Using telemetry combined with automated/computerized data logging, processing and analysis, a graduate student can now achieve in one year what would once have taken a small army with a limitless budget decades to do. Wildlife telemetry can also yield ancillary data for pennies on the dollar: e.g. a tagged elephant seal can sample water temperature at depth (Remember global warming?) over space and time that no research ship could ever even consider covering.

[ChrisR]

When John McCain held a forum in Ames, Iowa recently, he started by saying that Congress must reduce wasteful spending. As an example, he said, "We spent $3 million to study the DNA of grizzlies in Montana!" At the time I didn't know about this project, but I wondered whether he knew anything about it.

A quick search yields this article, which describes how--instead of tranquilizing and tagging grizzlies--the researchers used DNA from hair and scat to track the bears.

Because this project sounded clever, elegant, and useful, I emailed Katherine Kendall, who is quoted in the article, to see if was her project. It was. She was dismayed that McCain is in his fourth year of using her project as an example, especially because she hasn't received funding since 2005. She also said that her team sampled over 7.8 million acres, much of which was rugged and roadless. Several federal, state, and tribal agencies had asked for research to determine the health of the grizzly population.

Not only was I disappointed with McCain's lack of intellectual curiosity and his inability to understand that tracking bears noninvasively is safer and more effective than tagging, I was surprised that he would show blatant disdain for science and research in a university town.

[cfrost]

McCain echoes the late senator Proxmire's "golden fleece award" baloney that was used to smear any kind of federally funded, non-military science the senator couldn't comprehend. These guys don't understand that new tricks in ecology/field biology, like remote telemetry, DNA techniques, stable isotopes, etc., yield much more, and much better information for much less money than was possible even ten years ago. Unless it's applied military research, which can't get enough money, wingnuts generally prefer a penny-wise, pound-foolish aproach to funding science, particularly anything having to do with biology.

I'm reminded of Pres. Ronald Reagan once whining about USDA research money going to study garden flower seed production. Um, Mr. President weren't you recently governor of a state that makes billions on specialty crops?

[ChrisR]

I goofed on the link in my 10:11 AM comment. It should be this.