‘In Goats We Trust’

When Mount Etna in Sicily rumbled this spring, news outlets around the world flashed dramatic photos of lava and ash. But Martin Wikelski was skeptical. The biologist, who directs the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, checked in with his most trusted forecasters: Twelve goats grazing on Etna’s slopes.

These goats have worn his lightweight tracking tags for more than a decade. Before each of the last seven major eruptions, they’d alerted the scientists with unusually frantic behavior. This time, they were calm. Further research showed that the widely reported eruption had looked visually striking but was actually minor and caused no damage.

“The goats were right,” Wikelski says from his office near Konstanz, Germany. “Therefore we still say, ‘in goats we trust.’”

Wikelski is the innovator behind a global vision, decades in the making, that could change animal research and conservation forever: ICARUS (the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) equips creatures from bats and birds to goats and giraffes with lightweight smart tags that beam data to satellites and CubeSats — smaller satellites the size of a shoe box — revealing real-time insights into animals’ rhythms. 

Most scientists studying migration patterns or endangered animals only have the means to do research in a defined area. But often, the most illuminating answers are global. What if animal data from around the world could be linked to answer pertinent questions about the spread of bird flu, say, or to predict disasters?

Investigating global animal migrations with an intelligent sensor network of animals — the “Internet of Animals” — opens a new frontier in harnessing animal observation as a tool for conservation. From volcanoes to poaching, from climate shifts to disease outbreaks, ICARUS can gather and interpret data from creatures big and small to help protect ecosystems, and sometimes, people.

He likens this “grand endeavor” to the search for gravitational waves, or the beginning of time.

If everything goes well, SpaceX will launch the ICARUS 2.0 satellite later this month, enabling the reading of innumerable data across the globe. When Wikelski first had the idea in 2002, he hoped he could have the system up and running by 2005.

But cost, international diplomacy hazards and leaps in tech innovations slowed him down, forcing him to repeatedly start over. Wikelski is well-connected internationally. His bio includes postdoc work at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, as well as professor positions at the University of Illinois and at Princeton University from 2000 to 2008. He eventually found a cooperation partner in Russia, which launched the first ICARUS receiver to the International Space Station in 2018.

After a few years of gathering data, however, the cooperation between Germany and Russia came to an abrupt end in the spring of 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now Wikelski is eager to finally see ICARUS 2.0 come to fruition: “I hope the SpaceX rocket won’t explode, there are always variables.” The next four launches are already in the planning for next year.

ICARUS 2.0 will build on Movebank, the Max Planck Institute’s open-source platform that has been monitoring over 60,000 animal species since 2007. A worldwide community of researchers, conservationists, rangers and citizen scientists is already using Movebank, continually observing and adding data to build a more comprehensive picture of animal behavior and biodiversity. 

The platform also enables them to communicate with each other. Thus, a researcher in Kenya can access data in Galapagos, using the algorithm a coder designed in New York. Nearly half a million citizen scientists contribute to Movebank via the Animal Tracker app, which allows them to upload sightings of individual animals with photos.

The network has already opened a vault of new insights: “For instance, we learned that birds communicate amongst each other to warn about obstacles like windmills,” says Wikelski. “Migrating birds get this information from local birds, and we can see that they are then able to avoid obstacles like this. It’s just like we learn from locals or other tourists which streets in Chicago you better not walk at night.”

Eventually, Movebank will relocate to the renowned Natural History Museum Senckenberg near Frankfurt with the intent to preserve the living data for eternity.

Detailed knowledge of individual animal behavior also allows his teams to detect outliers, such as the white stork who took a different route from his companions and ended up in the Bavarian Alps in the winter.

Baffled how a stork could survive there at that time of year, one of his ornithologists drove five hours to the Bavarian village where she found the stork happily hanging out near a farmhouse and demanding food by knocking his beak against a window. A traditional folk tale says that storks bring babies, and because the stork’s arrival coincided with her daughter giving birth, the grandmother there named him Hansi like her new grandson, provided him warm baths for his cold feet, and fed him a daily diet of minced sheep liver.

“We were speechless,” Wikelski remembers. “We witnessed that the young white stork had actively adopted a farmer’s family and asked for food from his human friends.”

Another example of saving species with tagging is in Africa’s Kruger National Park, where a network of vultures doubles as anti-poaching sentinels. “When more than two vultures meet in Kruger, we assume they’re gathering around a carcass, potentially a poached rhino,” says Wikelski. 

If a vulture dies, therefore, there’s a chance poachers have had a hand to play in it. And since Wikelski can detect that loss of life almost in real time: “Then we immediately send rangers, sometimes by helicopter.”

The system has saved human lives too. When a buffalo gored one ranger and another suffered a knife wound, their teams used the ICARUS alert network to summon immediate medical help.

Crucially, it’s no longer just human eyes that are watching. AI has enabled quantum leaps in monitoring and researching animal behavior, since it can analyze vast amounts of data almost in real time. 

Various alerts on Max Planck Institute’s open-source analysis platform MoveApps help Wikelski’s teams monitor anything from Etna eruptions to earthquakes, rhino poachers and stork deaths.

Technical innovations and plummeting costs have fueled this expansion. Even three years ago, the invoice for a satellite system would have been around $70 million. Now the launch cost for one satellite has decreased to $200,000. Shouldering the costs with numerous partners including National Geographic and private companies, Wikelski estimates the development costs for ICARUS to be less than $2 million.

Simultaneously, the cost and size of tags has shrunk dramatically. Wikelski has been a researcher long enough to remember the 1980s when he had to cut a roof in an old station wagon to stick a receiver through and race as fast as he could across the plains of Illinois to keep up with the songbirds overhead.

The tags, often equipped with AI, allow researchers to know not only the location of the animal, but also its weight, speed, temperature and calorie consumption.

“We can read their behavior and even their interactions with other animals, which is incredibly important, for instance, for the spread of disease,” Wikelski says. The advanced technology allows him to discern “if a horse is running on grass or gravel, if a female bird is nesting, and whether a penguin in Antarctica is returning to his family with a full belly.” He likens the system to “fitbands for penguins, but they work much better than the ones available for humans.”

One of the first species Wikelski’s team of 40 researchers wants to focus on once the new satellite is up and running are African flying foxes — “the most important gardeners in Africa,” according to Wikelski. “They fly over deserted areas nobody dares to visit right now, including in South Sudan or Burkina Faso, and drop seeds, reforesting the areas. We know now that their actions are incredibly important for the climate.”

This example illustrates some of the research ICARUS 2.0 can accomplish that was previously impossible, revealing how animals shape landscapes. “Unbelievably exciting,” Wikelski exclaims, his enthusiasm for his research infectious. He is convinced the costs will continue to plummet until tagging is affordable for most conservation groups. He envisions eventually not only tagging animals but also, for instance, fishing nets so ghost nets can be located and don’t drift in the seas, where they would otherwise endanger innumerable fish and mammals.

For him, tagging an animal requires weighing the benefits with the stress it causes the animals. “If they work for us, then we have to give them back so much that it’s a net benefit for them,” Wikelski explains. “Maybe not for each single individual, but if we tag 100 stork and that enables us to save 10,000 storks from electrocution, that’s a net benefit for the species.”

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He recently returned from a trip to Sardinia, Italy, where he helped band flamingos. “In half an hour we caught and banded four dozen young flamingos,” he reports, taking less than 30 seconds for each animal so as not to stress them. The new generation of tags is embedded within the band and able to monitor them for the duration of their lives. “After two days, we already had 2,000 data points.”

Of course, Wikelski’s team is aware that poachers would love to access this wealth of data, too. “Our communication is encrypted,” Wikelski says. “Even if they listened to us, they wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Data for critical species is kept strictly confidential. Only the head of conservation at Kruger can access the location of critical species, for instance rhinos. 

From goats that outsmart volcano headlines to vultures that save both wildlife and people, ICARUS is proving that animals are not just part of the planet’s ecosystems, they’re active collaborators in keeping it alive.

Scrolling photos courtesy of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Christian Ziegler.