Animals and technology
Digital technology is opening up new relationships between humans and animals – instead of alienating us from nature as in the past. Thanks to sensors, GPS and mini-cameras, scientists can now gather data on animal migration and behaviour on an unprecedented scale. Data that’s being turned into stories online. New devices are improving our communication with animals – literally.
The Friday repeat of this Future Tense program (as broadcast on RN) includes an edited version of the program CrowdScience from the BBC World Service.
Alexander Pschera, journalist and author who is working on the history and philosophy of technology
Dr Guy Anderson, Research Manager, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
Dr Clive McMahon, Animal tracking operations manager for the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS)
David Roberts, Associate Professor of Computer Science, North Carolina State University
Sari - most adorable, black cat
Karin Zsivanovits: The wild ospreys in the UK are social media celebrities, with a growing fan base monitoring their every move via a live cam. Wolves in Yellowstone National Park, polar bears in Spitzbergen, sharks in the waters of California; tracking animals has become a huge social media phenomenon.
Welcome to Future Tense, I'm Karin Zsivanovits, sitting in for Antony Funnell.
While technology used to alienate us from nature, now digital technology opens up a new dialogue between humans and animals and plays a major role in re-uniting us.
Author and journalist Alexander Pschera calls it the 'animal internet', and for him it all started with a group of Northern Bald Ibises in Germany, which have nearly 2,000 followers on Facebook.
Alexander Pschera: This bird, this ibis has a very sad story. He was extinguished in the 19th century and now they are trying to reintroduce him into nature, and they are breeding him up in Austria and then he has to migrate in winter to Italy, but the young birds, the new birds, they aren't able to migrate because they have lost their genetic intelligence. So people have to help them with small planes for the first time, so in the second year they will be able to do this on their own.
But to study exactly where they are going, what they are doing, what their behaviour is, the scientists put sensors on those birds and at the same time they feel the need to communicate with the people, and so they set up this Facebook page. Mainly it was about the lost birds because not all of them reach their target or their goal in Italy, so they got lost in Switzerland. And people tried to relocate him by those GPS data. They went out into the woods with their binoculars and they helped the scientists to locate the bird, to tell their observations.
So, for example, one of those birds socialised with a bunch of geese, which was not normal because they have normally nothing in common. But he saw, okay, this is the only group of bigger birds living here in the snow, which is too cold for me, and I'll join them to find the way out. So they did really significant observations on the behaviour of this species. So a very interesting mixture of two different uses of technology. One, the study of the migration and the behaviour, on the other hand the interaction with people. This is only the tip of the iceberg because this is only one of thousands of projects going on. So this was not only fun, this was really popular science which was realised on this Facebook page.
Karin Zsivanovits: In what ways and how detailed can ordinary people now be part of and get involved in the lives of animals?
Alexander Pschera: So this is possible by a database which is called Movebank.org by the Max Planck Institute in Germany where are all the data are collected and put into graphic design. Then you have some interesting Facebook pages or blogs where the data of moving animals, so migrating animals, is put into little stories. Some of them are done by editors who transform the data into animal life stories. Others are automated, so the text blocks are linked to certain data, this is called self-blogging animals.
At the moment it's the beginning, at the moment it's mainly birds which are studied. This is due to the development of the sensor technology, and I think we will see much more data in the next year. We see the beginning of a new era where people are coming back to nature via the internet, and this closes a gap which we have created on our own in the last 200 years. But I think it takes a lot of investment and even technological know-how and communication know-how to bring people to watch animals on the internet on a larger scale.
Karin Zsivanovits: And it's not just about the observations, but it's an opportunity to let the animals tell their own unmediated stories.
Alexander Pschera: Exactly, this is the idea, and this is one of the most interesting points of this concept, that you can follow an animal not as a representative of a species with a specific behaviour, but we can watch how is it behaving as an individual. And when I say individual, I think this goes into animal ethics and into the question of how individual animals are.
The idea is to create self-blogging structures, which is a limited technology of storytelling, for sure, but it's interesting because you have this idea of creating stories out of data without the interaction of man. It's an interesting methodology, to give animals a language which they hadn't. When you put a camera into a nest of an eagle which sends 24-hour pictures from these birds, people get the real picture of the nature, they get the rough picture of the nature, they get authenticity. It's a complete different thing when they go to the Discovery Channel and look at the storytelling of someone where you have selected the materials. So I think the internet has the possibility to bring back people to the real images.
Karin Zsivanovits: You've written that the animal internet is a historic opportunity for new dialogue between man and nature. Can you elaborate on that?
Alexander Pschera: Yes, because the question is how authentic our relationship to the animals is. This authentic relationship with animals went down with the technology, coming up with the diminution of the relevance of animals in the 20th century. And now we have some very alienated relationships to animals which we are trying to overcome by going to zoos, by doing birdwatching, by having pets. But I don't think these are real dialogues because when you go to the zoo, it's not about studying their behaviour, it's like you experience your own expectations in the zoo, and the same with birdwatching, it's not about studying a species, it's collecting sightings, just like a Sudoku in nature.
So these are all, I would say, transformations of a desire to get in contact with nature, but they are degenerated by our own mind. I believe that this information or data that the animal internet provides which can be aggregated to stories or aggregated to descriptions of their real situation, they are much more authentic and much nearer to nature than all those other disciplines, and I think because of that we can bridge the gap of the 20th century and get a closer look at the animals right now.
Karin Zsivanovits: But isn't there a danger though that animals come to be seen by an increasingly technology dependent younger generation as may be simply another digital destruction, another diversion on their smart phones?
Alexander Pschera: Could be, yes. But when you put a new media technology into place, like the TVs in the '50s, people use it abundantly and without control. So yes, it can be, but you have always collateral damage when you introduce technologies. I think the aspects of positive impact are much bigger than those relative dangers.
There has to be a philosophical concept where we can think about nature and technology in one room, in one space, not that we create more technology which destroys nature. The digital technology brings us nearer to the core of the things, the understanding of nature is increased, and this creates a closer relationship between us as mankind who are part of the nature too, and the animals who are part of the nature also. So it's something like a missing link, the animal internet.
Karin Zsivanovits: Scientists started using identification rings with birds at the turn of the 20th century. But with digital technology—GPS, sensors, mini-cameras—they can now gather data about animals on an unprecedented scale. And while we thought we knew so much about the migration of birds or whales, it turns out we don't know nothing.
Guy Anderson, Research Manager at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Guy Anderson: Developments in new technology over the last 10 to 20 years have completely revolutionised our ability to understand how animals and particularly birds move around during their lives. And that's movements on a whole range of scales, from local movements, maybe going to find food to feed to their chicks, all the way up to global migration patterns. What new electronic tagging allows us to do is to follow the journey between A and B. So we learn so much more. We know now, for example, where some of our breeding seabirds feed when they are going out to sea. We know some of the detailed migration routes that some of our northern breeding species take when they are migrating down into Asia or into Africa. And we know the fact that some of those species don't use the same route when they are coming back in the spring now, things that we can only guess at historically.
Karin Zsivanovits: Have there been many surprises when it comes to these bird migrations?
Guy Anderson: Yes, absolutely. We're continually being surprised by what we're finding out from these tags. New feats of endurance, new locations, surprising locations for some of our birds. So one example I can give you is a small wading bird called the red-necked phalarope. We have a very small breeding population of red-necked phalaropes here in the UK. We had no idea where our small breeding population spent the winter, but by using small electronic tags called geolocators, we managed to discover that it looks like our population actually spends the winter in the Pacific, in the Eastern Pacific, just south of the Galapagos Islands. So, quite incredible, and the first record that we have of a bird that breeds in north-west Europe actually spending the winter in the Pacific Ocean. We would never have predicted that.
Karin Zsivanovits: What are the conservation benefits of this new knowledge?
Guy Anderson: The benefits of the information coming back from these tags, they are huge. Knowing where birds are can help us identify key sites for conservation and we can then focus in on those areas and ask the question, well, are they protected, are there any threats? And I'm thinking here about where animals are coming into conflict with humans. So, for example, we still have a big issue with illegal killing of some bird species here in the UK and in some other countries too. We are using tracking technology to help us understand better where and when that is occurring, so that's an additional benefit.
So one side is being able to look directly at the sites which birds use, but the other is to be able to understand why those birds are going there. Electronic tags came along and we've been able to work out in some very fine detail some of the key feeding areas now offshore for some of our key seabird species. And this has helped us do two things. It's helped us understand why birds are going to feed in those areas because we've been able to look at those areas of sea and say, well, what's special about them? And there are some pretty clear links to the food chain. That allows us to predict what might happen in the future under things like climate change scenarios. We know our oceans are going to change and we can start to predict how that might affect where those good feeding areas might shift to in the future, and that can help us guide which areas of our oceans we might want to put most conservation effort into in the future.
Karin Zsivanovits: Let's talk about the technology itself. What is so special with this new technology that we are seeing?
Guy Anderson: Electronic tags are developing quite rapidly. So far, most of the information that they have been delivering has been to give locations, but things are changing. So tags are now available that can measure altitude, they can measure water depth, so they are useful for tracking diving species, they can measure temperature, they can start to measure physiological variables about the animals, they can measure heartrate, they can measure acceleration in different planes, and that starts to be able to use…again, in terms of interpreting what birds are doing at particular points in space and time. We are now getting to the stage where we can follow birds around, potentially see how they might react to the proximity of, say, man-made structures.
Karin Zsivanovits: Guy Anderson from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I'm Karin Zsivanovits, this is Future Tense.
And the sort of tracking technology that Dr Anderson was talking about is advancing all the time and will become even more sophisticated in the future.
Guy Anderson: So firstly it's continued militarisation. That has been one of the most important developments recently in terms of applying this technology to a wider and wider range of birds and animals, so that the size of bird, one in which electronic tags can be deployed, is coming down and down and down. So we are now able to fit tags to birds as light as 10 to 15 grams. That's largely due to development in both the electronic tag technology but also battery technology as well. That's very important, to get the weight down. So we will see an expansion of application of these tags to a wider and wider range of species, quite probably to insects. So that's one.
The other main development I think will be a continuation of adding new data gathering sensors onto these tags, and that might extend to being able to record video. So we are already experimenting with tags that combine GPS locations with short video clips, literally a bird's eye view of what they are doing, wherever they are. And that can help us understand why they are visiting the places, using the locations that they are doing. What are they doing there? Are they feeding, are they roosting, are they trying to find mates? Without actually having that visual as to what the birds might be doing, we might be guessing. Indeed, we've already seen developments where tags basically create their own messages, their own updates.
Karin Zsivanovits: So, learning more about animal behaviour through high-tech devices. But this is only one side of the coin. Today, animals themselves become partners in the pursuit of scientific discovery.
Dr Clive McMahon is the Animal Tracking Operations Manager for the Integrated Marine Observing Service. He's following elephant seals into the depths of the Southern Ocean.
Clive McMahon: So the instruments that we attach to the elephant seals are called CTD recorders, and CTD stands for Conductivity, Temperature and Depth. So what the instrument is measuring, it's measuring how much salt is in the water, the temperature of the water, and obviously how this changes as the animal dives.
Because elephant seals dive really deeply—they can go up to 2,000 metres—we get a really neat and detailed picture of what the water column looks like around the Antarctic. It's helping us to identify these areas of bottom-water foundation, and bottom-water…well, it's one of the most important water bodies that drive ocean currents around the world, and we need these currents to mix water, to mix heat, to mix oxygen, carbon dioxide, all of those sorts of things. So it's really important that we have a good handle on where this bottom-water is formed and how much of it is formed. And the data coming back from the seals is helping us do that.
Karin Zsivanovits: Okay, so why adopt this particular approach? What is it that these sensor laden seals offer that you can't get from other forms of monitoring?
Clive McMahon: The Antarctic is quite a hostile place. So in winter it's all frozen. And what that means is it's really hard for us to get in there with ships, we need super-duper icebreakers that we don't always have access to. So there's very little information from south of 60 degrees. The alternative to using a big ship of course is to use some kind of instrument that you put in the ocean like an Argo float, and it might drop down to the ocean floor and come to the surface and transmit some data. But the problem is that there's this huge ice sheet that develops each year, and that blocks these Argo floats coming into the area that we are interested in. And this is where the seals come into play because they are living in the Antarctic, which means that all year they are collecting information from a really unique part of the ocean that we can't collect any other way.
From our current program we've collected more than 2,000 of these CTD profiles just this year so far. So it's an enormous amount of data that comes back. With the satellite linked instrument that we use, the information comes back essentially in real time for anyone to use. IMOS, it's a global leader in this field where data are being collected by individual scientists and programs and made available to the global community.
Karin Zsivanovits: I understand that about 300 elephant seals have now been fitted with these sensors. Do you think that more and other animals might be used for gathering scientific data in the future?
Clive McMahon: Absolutely, and in the northern hemisphere there is a large number of programs attaching similar instruments to whales and seals. There are projects in the tropics attaching these clever instruments to turtles. And so what we are starting to get is a really integrated view of what the globe's oceans look like and how they might be changing. I'm not entirely sure but there's probably about 30 active programs tracking animals around the globe. So these are really exciting times, and I think a lot of the work that has come out of Australia and our partners in France and the UK and South Africa and the US as well has shown the value and the use of these data that are being collected by the seals, and now the global community is coming on board in a much more enthusiastic way, one might say.
Karin Zsivanovits: How do you mount these tracking devices onto the animals? I imagine it can be challenging.
Clive McMahon: It's actually a fairly simple and straightforward procedure because what tends to happen is the instrument is glued straight onto either the fur or the shell of an animal. And we use a two-part epoxy that cures at a fairly low temperature. So it doesn't get too hot. In other words, it doesn't harm the animal's skin in any way. Seals in particular, they moult once a year, so the instrument will stay on for about a year and then it will just naturally fall off.
We use a little bit of anaesthetic that we inject intravenously, and that means the animals go to sleep quite quickly, usually within 30 to 60 seconds, and then we're able to attach the instrument while the animal is asleep. It's sort of using the right group of researchers to target specific animals. Ultimately we don't want to effect the animals in any negative way. So we went and early on in this study did quite a lot of work to look at what the effect of these instruments were. So we looked at growth rates and we found that the animals that were carrying the instruments gained the same amount of mass as animals not carrying instruments. We found that the animals carrying instruments have the same sort of breeding activity and breeding success.
And then finally we looked at the longer term effects. So the effect might be an insidious one that takes many years to manifest, so we actually looked at survival in the long term of animals carrying instruments, and compared that to the survival of animals not carrying instruments, and we couldn't find any differences. And we feel because the instruments are quite small, the comparison of the instrument mass to the seal mass is usually less than 0.1% of the animal's mass. So in reality it's a very small piece of equipment that is attached to the seal. It is very unlikely, and we don't have any evidence of it negatively affecting animals.
Karin Zsivanovits: That's my black cat Sari, and she's clearly asking for a treat here.
And that means: Open this door for me, now.
Most of us know quite well what our animals want to tell us. But in some situations 'quite well' is just not good enough. For example, with guide dogs. Associate Professor of Computer Science, David Roberts, has developed a harness to improve the communication between a disabled person and his assistant.
David Roberts: The harness is a wearable system. So we have computing devices and sensors that we put on the dog. The sensors are monitoring things about what the dog is doing, in particular their movements and body position as well as their physiology. So their heart rate and respiratory rate. And using wireless communications we are able to send that information to a computer, a laptop that's nearby, and machine learning algorithms, data mining algorithms go through that and interpret things about what the dog is doing. I'll use panting as an example. Panting is a thermoregulatory process but it's also a stress process, and the subtle differences between those two requires really an expert eye to detect the differences reliably. But the physiological signals that correlate with those things—the changes in heart rate, the changes in respiratory rate—are things that can be measured much more objectively using technology.
Karin Zsivanovits: With this really detailed interpretation, how far off are we?
David Roberts: I would say we are still pretty far off. The technology that we have is very much a research technology. We've shown a lot of promise but there's still a lot more that we need to do in terms of expanding beyond the core behaviours that we've started with. So we put a lot of effort into stress and anxiety but there are many other things I think that people will be very interested to know about their dogs that we haven't really started on.
And then there's also the natural progression of the technology from the research lab to becoming a commercial product. So I would estimate that we are probably at least 7 to 10 years away from something really viable being available.
Karin Zsivanovits: Now at another American university, Georgia Tech, researchers have also been creating a smart harness. It's what they call the Fido Project. But their device works in a different way to the one David Roberts and his team are developing.
David Roberts: We are passively monitoring dogs for their natural communications. The group at Georgia Tech is instrumenting dogs with active sensors, so things are dogs can be trained to intentionally operate to send signals back to humans through computers. These are things like tug sensors or bite sensors or proximity sensors that the dogs can be trained to operate intentionally to indicate things to their handlers or to their humans.
I will give you an anecdote which I think is just a fantastic example of the potential of this technology. So the anecdote is about a woman in a wheelchair, and she got into a position where her wheelchair was stuck and she needed help. And so she was able to send her dog up to another group of people, and the dog tugged on its harness which played a recorded sound through a speaker which said, 'Help, my owner needs your help, please follow me.'
Karin Zsivanovits: So your team at North Carolina State University have also been using the harness to develop a better initial training program for working dogs. What are the advantages it offers?
David Roberts: The fundamental characteristics of training that make it effective are measured by three different characteristics. So number one is timing, and that is when dogs or all animals, this is actually universal, it's not just dogs, when they perform a behaviour and there's a consequence of that behaviour, and the consequence in our case is always reinforcement, a food reward or play, the time delay between when they perform that behaviour and when the consequence or the reinforcement occurs is very predictive of how quickly the animal learns. Computers, as you know, are very fast.
The second characteristic that's really important is criteria, so making sure that the behaviours that get reinforced are very consistent, and computers have infinite patience and can be made to pay great attention, and so they can be extremely consistent in what they reinforce.
Last then is the rate of reinforcement, or how much behaviours get reinforced in any period of time. And we know that the more reinforcement that can occur in any period of time, the faster learning occurs. Computers have perfect accuracy in measuring this in real time. So those three key elements are critical to the success of training, and they are three things in which computers have distinct advantages over people.
Karin Zsivanovits: Now the logical question flowing from this is: does the technology open a new door for communication between humans and dogs?
David Roberts: It's my sincere belief that it does. I believe that technology opens up a window for untold possibilities. I think the future possibilities are virtually limitless once we have really cracked the code, once we have really matured this technology to the point that we can detect a wide array of animal behaviours, and not just with dogs. I liken what we are doing here to the design of a keyboard and mouse and screen for a computer. And so what we're trying to do is build the equivalent of these devices for dogs so that they can operate and interact with computers in a way that enables them to communicate more effectively with humans.
So the harness is the mediator, it's the interface that enables us to send information to the dog and get information from the dog. It's the algorithms that we implement on computers that go through and interpret that data, that perform the role of translation. We will be able to get meaningful information to and from dogs using technology like this at some point in the future, things that help us understand our dogs' moods, whether they are happy or sad, tired, not feeling well. We may even be able to get to the point of localising some information, why they are not feeling well. But let me qualify that by saying I don't think we will ever get to the point where dogs will be able to speak to us using our language through a communication device. Dogs don't have…from everything we can tell, they don't have the cognitive ability to form and produce language the way that humans do.
Karin Zsivanovits: David Roberts from North Carolina State University.
And we also heard from Alexander Pschera, author of Animal Internet, Guy Anderson from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and Clive McMahon from the Integrated Marine Observation Service.
So, as much as we love our pets, we'll have to rely on our powers of interpretation to understand what they're trying to tell us.
Yes, my little darling, me too!
I'm Karin Zsivanovits. And you've been listening to Future Tense.
- Animal Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution
- Alexander Pschera, Elisabeth Lauffer (Translator)
- New Vessel Press, 2016
- Karin Zsivanovits
- Antony Funnell