25. The Connected Wild: Earth’s Internet of Animals
SYNOPSIS:
Throughout history, many cultures have observed and interpreted animal behavior to predict events and read the landscapes around them. The multi-species lives of our planet weave an astonishing network of information across the face of the globe, a web of knowledge compromised of thousands of creatures communicating with each other, across species, and with their environments.
How we listen in on this collective intelligence? Today’s guest Martin Wikelski is director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) - a project which has been dubbed as ‘the internet of animals’. Their team has created a global ecological monitoring system, attaching remote sensing chips to thousands of animals in the wild, in effect uncovering and translating, as Martin says, ‘the collective intelligence of life on earth’.
By tuning in to the communication and culture of animals, the project his project reveals the planet's hidden workings with enormous implications for conservation, global finance, and human infrastructure.
We explore many of these forward-thinking ideas in this episode, adding another layer to Lifeworlds’ ongoing question: How do we sense the planetary and see through the perspectives of other life?
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The Connected Wild: Earth’s Internet of Animals
QUOTES:
There are so many animals out there that can't voice their concerns about what's happening on the planet. And we have now means to do that. We have ways to start to translate their needs. It's good for us and it's good for the animals.
Animals predict future harvests: for example in Gulf of Mexico the seabirds in April predict the anchovy harvest in October because they are out there eating the small fish larvae, and they decide how to schedule their reproduction depending on how much food can be found.
The seed dispersal fruit bats in Africa probably plant roughly a hundred million trees every night.
We now know that animals have culture and it changes all the time. They also have fashion.
You can ask animals how they see their world by producing tiny little ear tags that you give them. The poachers or tourists don’t know that they have these tags and can’t see them. They're constantly measuring the acceleration and the speed of movement of the ears, and can sense when they get nervous. If several in a group do that then you know there is a problem. You can even determine where that is by the reaction of the animals, by how they wiggle their ears, how they look at things in their world.
We don't know where the 15, 000 storks in Germany go to the south in the fall, and about 10 to 12,000 die every year. But where, when, why, nobody knows. Or the 5 billion songbirds that go from Europe to Africa, about two and a half billion die every year. Does anybody know where and why and how? No. It’s absolutely stunning if you think about that.
Marine animal data is already being used by NOA to measure the salinity and ocean currents in areas where nobody else can go.
What we can do is verify and transmit what animals feel and see into value, global credits, biodiversity credits or carbon credits. Then the local people can get a payout for their their actions towards keeping biodiversity on the planet healthy. I think that's important that we have a real time system of reporting, allowing the animals to report their own health and safety.
People can really do that. They can have the individual animal linked to them and get live feeds all the time. So that makes it really attractive.