The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth by Martin Wikelski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The author is a wildlife biologist and Director of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. He and his colleagues have devised the concept of an Internet of Animals as the title calls it, which is essentially a global tracking system for animals both wild and domesticated. They have worked for decades toward this goal and partially implemented it through Project Icarus jointly with Russian scientists. The system consists essentially of three parts: a tagging system to put on animals, a satellite to receive signals from the tags, and a database to record and analyze the information. The satellite was mounted on the ISS and began operation, but the Ukraine War ended the cooperation of the Russians and the program was short-lived. But it has since been restored to life with a new plan to launch a new satellite later this year without the need for Russia or the ISS. Although this is a lifelong dream of the author and his inner circle, I’m not sure the scientific community as a whole, or the general public at all, would consider this quite as lofty an achievement.
Nevertheless, the book is fascinating throughout, at least most of the time. It details the author’s many expeditions and biological discoveries, anecdotes of meeting helpful (or not) local people all over the world, and some often amusing stories. The descriptions of the obstacles involved in fashioning tags and how those have been overcome especially intrigued me. The tags alone are a truly incredible engineering feat but it also has to be combined with a range of protocols for how and where to install them on a wide variety of animals from elephants to dragonflies. You may think it’s impossible to make a small electronic tag that will fit comfortably on a bird and yet be powerful enough to collect and transmit data to a passing satellite, but it has already been done.
The book centers on Icarus, but is more than that. Much of it is about how the author connected with others who have been instrumental in the project, and described their many unrelated clever research triumphs (and not-so-clever failures). The author tends toward the egotistical, but can be self-deprecating such as when he describes how he got a horrible case of poison ivy climbing a tree because he is so bad at plant identification. Anyone who enjoys wildlife stories or field research will enjoy this book.