This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Field biologists tend to be a patient lot, often resigned to long days and weeks in the field and committed to experiments that take years to yield results. But even among that dogged crowd, Martin Wikelski stands out.
Back in 2001, sitting on a porch one evening in Panama, the German ornithologist had the germ of an idea for an “internet of animals,” a global system of sensor-wearing wildlife that would reveal the planet’s elusive, nonhuman worlds. He figured he could get it up and running by 2005. Nearly 20 years later, Wikelski may have finally succeeded—after surmounting roadblocks that range from bureaucratic mishaps to technical glitches to a geopolitical crisis.
His space-based system, known as ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space), is now scheduled to launch, in its latest, satellite-based incarnation, on a private rocket sometime in 2025. The underlying idea of the internet of animals is to tune into the planet’s hidden phenomena—the flight paths followed by sharp-shinned hawks, the precise fates befalling Arctic terns that die young, the exact landscape requirements of critically endangered saiga antelope—by attaching tiny, solar-powered tracking devices, some weighing less than a paperclip, to all kinds of organisms and even some inanimate objects (glaciers, ocean plastic debris). The inexpensive, g.