Martin Wikelski, the director of the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, came up with the idea to create an “internet of animals” back in 2001: A global system of animals that wear sensors and could be tracked remotely, to help researchers better understand the world of wildlife.
His motivation was to quietly follow migration patterns and ecological experiences of the world’s most fascinating species: Tiger sharks on shorelines, flight-paths of sharp-shinned hawks, or even the landscape conditions of critically endangered antelopes.
This would be done by attaching super-small, solar-powered trackers to these animals — some weighing less than a paperclip. He also planned to attach the items to some inanimate objects, like ocean plastic waste, or even glaciers.
Wikelski compared them to “Fitbits for wild creatures,” according to MIT Technology Review, allowing researchers to monitor the animals’ heart rates, body heat, sudden movements, as well as temperature, humidity, and air pressure in their environments.
The signals from these “Fitbits” would be received at the International Space Station and beamed back down to Earth, where researchers would produce a map of the animals’ path in nearly real-time.
In 2018, the project finally came to fruition, and ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) was born.
After years of working alongside designers, engineers, and government officials from across the globe, Wikelski’s first ICARUS receiver made its way to the Russian Space Agency’s arm of the ISS. It was the result of a €50 million (nearly $54 million) investment from the German Aerospace Centre and the Russian Space Agency.
The “Internet of Animals” finally went live in March 2020, but mechanical issues on the Russian craft took the system down. It was brought back, and a coalition of international researchers were able to receive data from roughly 3,500 tagged animals, according to Yale 360.
But in early 2022, Russia’s war on Ukraine began, the West cut ties with the country, and ICARUS came to an abrupt end.
Wikelski — ever persistent — wrote in his recent book “The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth,” that “making people aware of the incredible beauty and richness of what’s happening out there,” has made his efforts worthwhile.
Though, he “had no clue how many pitfalls there would be.”
Despite immense frustrations, Wikelski’s team hoped to continue working with the German Aerospace Centre, but in the final hour, ICARUS was left out of budget negotiations.
Wikelski refused to give in. ICARUS is now scheduled to launch in its newest iteration in 2025.
Now, Wikelski and team plan to launch five small CubeSats — miniature 10-centimeter cubic satellites that are lightweight and relatively inexpensive. They will be launched using private companies, funded by the Max Planck Society.
Scaling down dramatically from its original €50 million investment, the new era of ICARUS will cost about $1.57 million upfront, and will have an annual operating cost of about $160,000, according to Yale 360.
“ICARUS has flown back into space,” Wikelski said in a statement in July. “And now, we have an even better view of life on Earth than before.”
In recent years, Wikelski’s team has adapted the new system to shrink the animal tags and designed new ways to affix them to animals, which means they will now be able to study even more species. They are also eager to begin using AI to help interpret data.
“We’ve taken advantage of technological leaps over the last years to streamline our operations,” Wikelski added. “Now, scientists can communicate with sensors much more efficiently via the ICARUS receiver in space.”
Of course, in the span of over two decades, other researchers and AI enthusiasts have developed similar animal tracking systems — meaning that this once “fringe” idea might even surpass its inventor.
But Wikelski wants to go big.
“The dream is an ongoing cohort of say 100,000 animal sentinels that help us humans measure, understand, and mitigate our changes to this planet,” said Walter Jetz, co-director of the center and professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and of the Environment at Yale University.
ICARUS has officially caught the sights of NASA, which is already part of a five-year project to explore satellite animal tracking.
“We’re very much focused on developing future mission concepts that will come after the current set of ICARUS missions,” Ryan Pavlick, a researcher in remote sensing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told MIT.
Right now, those missions include “architecture studies” that help build out the technical systems of partners like the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as the United States Geological Survey.
Of course, the full nature of ICARUS is to be a worldwide resource — which many conservationists are eager to see brought to life.
Ellen Aikens, a biologist at the University of Wyoming, who did her postdoctoral research on animal migration under Wikelski, told Yale 360 that ICARUS could serve as a “democratizing force” in her field.
“Folks that have a smaller budget or are working on species that are a bit more obscure and there’s not as much funding behind can start to get the same kind of information, baseline info, about where those [animals] are going,” she said.
And that’s not to mention the enormous benefit the technology could have in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.
Researchers of all stripes have different reasons to be excited about the tech; from tracking zoonotic diseases or charting behavioral disruptions in animals before a natural disaster, to simply seeing where endangered species go when no one is around to follow them.
“As [animals] move these vast distances, they can collect detailed environmental information in places that are difficult to monitor,” Aikens told Yale 360.
“[They] can take a pulse of the planet and be detectors of change and help us understand the health of the environment.”
With a long and winding history to get to this point, Wikelski is eager for the animal kingdom to be seen with fresh eyes.
“We’ve spent the last year optimizing sensor design and building in advances in AI,” he said in a statement. “What we have now is akin to a quantum leap forward: a system that helps the animal tell us their most important stories.”
Header image courtesy of Quang Nguyen Vinh/Pexels
