Wired Animal Kingdom Roams US Forests
10/17/99
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Wired Kingdom Roams the Forest
Source: The Denver Post
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: October 17, 1999
Byline: Mark Obmascik
Oct. 17 - The way the government planned it, Yellowstone wolf No. 9
was supposed to be a symbol of the raw American wilderness. But she
also ended up testing the limits of technology.
Before No. 9 was allowed to howl in the backcountry, federal
biologists stuck her with a tranquilizer dart and hung a palm-sized
electronic transmitter on her neck. By turning the wolf into a four-
legged radio station, researchers could track all her comings and
goings.
When No. 9 had sex, the government knew it. Officials also knew who
she bred with, when she gave birth, where she nursed her eight pups,
why she took a new lover, how she shared that lover with two
daughters and how one daughter kicked her out of her own home. The
government even knew whether she had elk or bison for dinner.
Now some nature buffs ask: Is this really wild?
Welcome to the U.S. government's Wired Kingdom, a place where so many
wild animals today are linked to transmitters and satellites that at
least four federal agencies - and dozens of other researchers - have
been granted their own radio frequencies just to follow critters.
Officials say that at least 6,000 animals now are wearing federal
wires. Besides wolf No. 9 in Montana, other electronically tracked
creatures include rattlesnakes in Wisconsin, blue whales in the
Pacific Ocean off California, laughing gulls in New York, Norway rats
in Hawaii and razorback suckers in Utah.
In Colorado, one researcher used wildlife telemetry to turn himself
into the world's foremost expert in the love life of the boreal toad.
A New York environmental group put transmitters on 10 snow geese and
let 15,000 schoolchildren follow the daily progress of the birds'
migration, on a computer Web page, from New Mexico to the Arctic.
Though all this electronic tracking has yielded unprecedented
knowledge of wildlife, some researchers wonder if man is using
technology too much.
It's harder to view the ocean as a wild place after you've seen a sea
turtle with an antennae on its shell. In Wyoming, scientists guard
the radio frequencies carried by grizzly bears like nuclear launch
codes; they fear profiteers will use the information to track down
the bruins and illegally kill them for their gall bladders, which are
prized as a Far East delicacy.
There also are worries that even the best, most responsible tracking
by government wildlife researchers leads animals to change their
normal behavior.
"Every time you handle a wild animal, it's more likely it will become
habituated to human contact,'' said Mike Clark, executive director of
the environmentalist Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "The essence of
wildlife is no controls and no managemeent.'' But Deb Guernsey of th
federal government's Yellowstone Wolf Project, said, "In a perfect
world, it would be great if we didn't have to collar wolves. But
there is so much misinformation out there about wildlife. We take a
lot of care to try not to intrude on them. We want to let wolves be
wolves.'' Technology makes it easier and easier to track wildlife.
The simplest devices, for small mammals and amphibians, are about the
size of a pinkie fingernail and cost less than $150. Wolf collars
sell for $400, and the biggest of the big - a satellite-linked
transmitter for elephants in Malaysia - runs about $3,000.
The simplest devices work like this: A small, battery-powered radio
transmitter is attached or implanted in the animal. The transmitter
broadcasts a signal picked up by a receiver carried by a field
researcher, who travels by foot, airplane or boat. The closer the
receiver gets to the animal-carried transmitter, the stronger the
signal. This allows the researcher to spot creatures that usually are
elusive.
This technology doesn't always make life easy for biologists. Bears
and wolves can move a lot faster than man, especially in rugged
terrain, so it's hard for researchers to keep up. So for many
wildlife-tracking projects, researchers fly over an area once or
twice a day for an occasional record of the animal's movements.
But to get more complete information, some researchers have turned to
satellite technology. Though there are several types, the most common
combines a timer with a GPS-like device, which records the exact
location of an animal and stores it in the collar, or another
external device, for retrieval later by researchers. The government
pays $25 per reading for these tracking devices.
The difference between radio and satellite technologies can be
dramatic. In Alaska, when the U.S. Forest Service proposed building a
new campground on the shores of Tustumenai Lake, biologists Chuck
Schwartz worried the new development might hurt the local black bear
population.
Studies done with radio-tracking collars, which tracked animal
locations once a day, showed the bears hardly ever moved through the
proposed campground site. But when Schwartz put satellite collars on
the bears, which recorded movements five times a day, he recorded far
more activity - and found that the campground was proposed in the
middle of a major bear migration route.
Because of the satellite study, the Forest Service killed its
campground plans, Schwartz said.
"If we put a radio collar on you and checked your location once or
twice every day, it would be easy to conclude that you spent all your
time at home or in the office,'' Schwartz said. "But if we put a GPS
collar on you, we'd see that you also drive places and go to get food
and go for walks. It's a more complete picture.''
Sometimes the complete picture isn't pretty.
On July 31, Gabriella Fredriksson, a Minnesota graduate student, was
tracking a radio-collared female sun bear through the wilds of Borneo
when she noticed the beeping signal had slowed.
That worried her. The bear's transmitter was designed to change
signals only if it hadn't detected movement for four hours; the slow
signal is called "mortality mode,'' which is used to alert
researchers when an animal dies.
Following the slowed signal through a swamp, Fredrikkson expected to
find a dead bear or a slipped-off radio collar.
Then her research took a truly wild turn.
"She encountered an eight-meter reticulated python. The radio signal
was emanating from a large bulge in the belly,'' said Fredriksson's
adviser, Minnesota state biologist Dave Garshelis. "The snake
wriggled away, and as it moved past the bulge, Gabriella heard the
cracking of bones.''
Today, the researcher is tracking the snake that ate a 50-pound bear
with a radio transmitter.
Wildlife telemetry also helped solve one of the great biological
questions of desert Southwest: Where do Colorado pikeminnow go
looking for romance?
Once the dominant predator of the Colorado River system, the
pikeminnow - a silvery fish that grows to 6 feet and formerly was
called the Colorado squawfish - had been decimated by years of
Western water development. Many of the best breeding locations were
believed to be flooded by dams.
So federal biologists David Irving and Tim Modde caught 12
pikeminnows in the White River near Rangely, and surgically implanted
them with transmitters about as large as a cigarette filter. When the
river swelled with spring snowmelt, government airplanes with radio
receivers started flying the river canyons.
They found the fish moving.
In just 1 months in May and June, seven of the 12 fish swam 105
miles down the White River into Utah, then 99 miles upstream into the
Green River through Dinosaur National Monument before moving another
18 miles upstream to a spawning bed on the Yampa River in Colorado -
a 222-mile spawning run.
The other five fish followed their neighbors down the White River,
but turned downstream on the Green River another 89 miles to another
spawning bed between Gray's and Desolation canyons.
After spawning was completed, all fish returned to their original
spots on the White River near Rangely by September. The fish repeated
the same epic trip the next year.
"If we didn't put radio transmitters in these fish, we never would
have known where they spawn,'' Modde said. "Now we know how important
it is to protect these
areas.''
The technology is used by more than scientists.
In 1997, the National Audubon Society joined with the British
Broadcasting System to attach satellite radios to 10 snow geese at
the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in southern New
Mexico.
With Web pages in New York and a television show from London, the
Wild Wings Heading North program followed the spring migration of the
geese to the Canadian Arctic. At the peak of the birds' migration in
May, the travels of the geese were followed by 331,000 visitors a
month to the Wild Wings web page. The migration was tracked by more
than 1,000 classrooms in the United States and Great Britain, the
Audubon Society said.
Because each goose got its own Web page, the migration turned into a
race for some classrooms, with students placing bets on the bird they
thought would arrive at the Arctic first. But some kids learned a
tough lesson about nature: Three of 10 snow geese mysteriously
disappeared during their migration and were presumed eaten by
predators.
"People loved Wild Wings. We had never had feedback this great on any
project before,'' said the Audubon Society's John Bianchi. "We had
classes calculating the amount of food their goose would have to eat
to travel so far. Classes were looking at weather to see how far
their bird could get that day. "Teachers told us that Wild Wings had
a lot of kids pretty excited about nature.''
Today there are other wildlife telemetry Web pages that, among other
things, follow elephants in Thailand, caribou in Alaska and wolves in
Minnesota.
Some projects are a lot closer to home. Near Berthoud Falls, Colorado
biologists were puzzled by a sudden decline in populations of the
rare boreal toad. So state Division of Wildlife researcher Mark Jones
started capturing toads and hooking them up to a tiny radio
transmitter.
By pointing his antennas at toads in spring snowstorms at night,
Jones learned that the species relies on relatively few breeding
spots. The males, which have notoriously poor eyesight, lurk around a
swamp in the dark and hop on anything that remotely resembles a
female.
At times, this has caused male toads to attempt to mate with a
scientist's shoe.
Radio transmitters also allowed researchers to learn another quirk
about the boreal toad's life: Males try breeding every year, but many
females are interested in reproducing only once every five years or
so. Researchers also have found evidence that toad numbers have been
plummeting lately because of an exotic fungus first detected in
Australia.
Last month, Jones and two other researchers performed their weekly
radio checks on toads preparing for hibernation. The palm-sized
creatures were living up slopes so steep that researchers used
mountainside aspens to pull themselves up to the toads' lair.
A few weeks earlier, a researcher tracked two toad transmitters into
the nest of a redtail hawk. On this day, though, the radio receiver
led researchers to a lone toad outside a ground squirrel hole.
"You can't believe these toads can climb so high, but they do,'' said
Jones, breathing hard from the climb.
"We wouldn't know it without telemetry.''
Still, researchers concede everyone isn't a fan of backcountry
technology. "It's a challenge to balance these concerns,'' said Glenn
Plumb, senior biologist at Yellowstone. "We do get good, reliable
information from telemetry, but we also have impacts to visitors.
People don't like looking at marked wildlife. I'm challenging the
wildlifers in the park to be more stingy with telemetry.''