Paul Clerkin makes his living roaming the oceans in search of obscure shark species. At 36, he’s already discovered more than a dozen.
A custom gadget like this would run around $10,000. So the Virginia Institute of Marine Science researcher is building his own, on the cheap. Every week, he meets with John Garst, a whiz-kid programmer who just graduated from the College of William & Mary in nearby Williamsburg. When they finish their work, they’ll share their designs online.
Around the globe, a growing community of scientists and technology experts is doing the same. Like Clerkin and Garst, they aim to accelerate the development of trackers, slash their prices and enable far more animals to be followed in the wild.
With climate change adding to the intense pressures on many species — according to a 2019 United Nations report, a million animal and plant species face imminent extinction — these efforts have a sense of urgency. Negotiators from around the world will start virtual talks this week on the latest response plan, with an eye to increasing the amount of land and water that each country sets aside as nature refuges. Greater tracking will help reveal what animals need to survive as migration patterns, food chains and breeding cycles are disrupted.
“We really have to rethink conservation,” Paul Leadley, a professor of ecology at the University of Paris-Saclay, noted recently following an international scientific report on the interplay between climate change and biodiversity. “Species and ecosystems are going to move around a lot as the climate warms.”
Animals have been tracked from air and space for decades, with ever-greater success as the number of satellites circling the planet multiplied. The cell towers that now cover the globe have added precision to measurements.
At the same time, the actual tracking devices have benefited from technological spillovers from other areas. Demand for higher-performance smartphones has brought about smaller, energy-efficient chips. Solar panels have shrunk, giving trackers longer life.
Ten years ago, those under 20 grams were deemed state-of-the-art. Now trackers weighing four grams, a touch lighter than a nickel, are common. Scientists project them to shrink further, enabling use with creatures as small as beetles and dragonflies.
With these advances have come important revelations: how 15 falcons anticipated prevailing winds to fly from India to Africa; where 20 black rhinos roamed in a park in Tanzania; and how two leatherback turtles successfully traveled through a key fishing ground in Trinidad — all clues that could help reverse their falling populations.
Ruth Oliver, an associate research scientist at Yale University, affixed 3½-gram GPS trackers to 55 American robins with nylon “backpacks.” She found that they seem to be migrating through Canada about five days earlier every decade, a likely response to a warming climate.
Oliver thinks there is huge potential to learn how migratory animals are adjusting, even optimizing, their movements to respond to various ecological pressures.
“Every time a new study comes out with tracking data, it’s upending preconceived notions of how animals use space,” she said. “The door is just wide open. We can’t fully appreciate what types of impacts this will have.”
Yet the cost of trackers — typically thousands of dollars — has limited their use and what can be learned about species in peril. It’s now fueling a search for alternatives.
In Germany, the Max Planck Society has joined with German and Russian space authorities on ICARUS, a project to follow millions of animals from the International Space Station. ICARUS engineers have teamed with companies that make retail electronics, hoping to fashion a tracker that can be mass-produced and customized across species.
Others are taking the open-source approach, sharing their tracker blueprints and all the hard-won lessons that went into them with anyone who’s interested.
“It really does open up a whole new world to us in the nonprofit sphere when we can access open-source technology,” said Mae Lacey, a data specialist at the D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife.
In the Netherlands, a group called Smart Parks has created a range of tracking collars to monitor species such as elephants and rhinos in African wildlife preserves. The specifications of its OpenCollar designs are public on GitHub, a website for sharing code.
And in the United Kingdom, an organization called the Arribada Initiative develops “open, affordable and accessible” technologies to aid conservation. It was founded by Alasdair Davies, a British technologist who’d grown frustrated with the cost of animal trackers.
A few years ago, Davies responded to a query from Thomas Gray, an affable West Virginia native with a ponytail and mutton chops. After almost a decade as an animal-tracker salesman, Gray had concluded the business was broken. Companies spent millions devising custom machines and so kept their work proprietary and their prices high, he groused.
Gray switched to the CLS Group, a French environmental company that operates the Argos satellite system following about 8,000 animals worldwide. In 2017 he emailed all Argos users: Did anyone want to build a tracker that was the opposite of bespoke — one that would be available to everyone?
Davies took on the challenge and came up with a chip that’s about the size of a nicotine patch and can communicate with Argos satellites practically out of the box. And in August 2020, CLS announced a sweepstakes that would award 20 do-it-yourself “kits” to whoever wanted to tackle an important tracking problem. Each would include two of those tiny chips, a free year of satellite service and free tech support from Arribada.
The catch: Winners will give away their designs.
“It’s a personal thing for me,” said Gray, who dreams of trackers that are cheap to buy and as easy to assemble as Legos. “Designed by biologists for biologists.”
So far the $1,500 kits have gone to nine awardees. Among them: a company trying to build an inexpensive polar bear ear tag for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, a pair of California high-schoolers who think they have a low-priced tracker to use when whales get tangled in fishing gear, and, in Virginia, Clerkin for his pursuit of the megamouth.
The shark has only been seen about 200 times since 1976, usually dead in fishing nets.
“We know almost nothing about megamouths,” he said. “Because of that, we can’t protect the species. We don’t know what they need for protection.”
The marine ecologist encountered his first in 2015 off the coast of Taiwan, during a trip funded by Discovery’s Shark Week. Equipped with two $4,000 trackers — which he’d wheedled a company into donating — Clerkin went out with a fishing captain who said he’d seen megamouths roaming.
Sure enough, around 3 a.m. they snagged a 20-foot female in a net dropped for just that purpose. Clerkin, an otherwise mellow Californian revved up on adrenaline and nerves, plunged into the water. He swam beneath the surface and affixed one of the trackers to the shark’s dorsal fin. It was the first satellite tag placed on a megamouth.
He has since tagged three more of the species. His research suggests megamouths are vagabonds, exploring temperate waters around the world but seemingly always returning to the Taiwanese coast. Clerkin suspects they’re there for the shrimp but wants his next tracker to prove it.
Taiwan now bans fishing for megamouths. Environmental authorities say the country is willing to go further and declare them a protected species if data supports the designation. Clerkin hopes to provide some of the findings.
Until now, his work with Garst has been slow going. A recent victory: They managed to connect to the tracker from a regular program on his computer.
The pair plan to finish building their tracker this year, test it in shallow waters near Virginia and ultimately hitch it onto a megamouth next year. The device would record the shark’s every turn, twist and acceleration for two full days.
“There’s always things you want to study in sharks, there’s all these unknowns,” Clerkin noted recently. “You think, I bet I could figure it out if I could get a tag that did X, Y and Z.”
“And if it doesn’t exist, it’d be really cool to make it.”
