5. Sentient Sensors

Yellowstone National Park – which ranges across Wyoming, Montana and Idaho – was established in 1872, and Americans like to call it the world’s first national park. By the 1950s and 60s, grey wolves had already disappeared from the park, but there was plenty of other wildlife living within its boundaries. Grizzly bears were a particular draw for American families – so much so that the park’s management installed raised seating at several rubbish dumps so tourists could sit and watch the bears rummage through food scraps and other litter.

As park attendance rose, so did the number of human-bear encounters. These interactions didn’t always end happily for either species. The animals destroyed property and injured some visitors; rangers were forced to kill bears with a history of ‘problem behaviour’ around humans.

The biologists (and brothers) John and Frank Craighead, thought that learning more about the bears’ lives could help Yellowstone’s managers reduce such interspecies conflicts. So the brothers decided to harness post-war advances in radio and transistor technology to conduct some grizzly surveillance. Beginning in 1961, the Craigheads trapped bears at Yellowstone, tranquilized them, and then outfitted them with collars containing radio transmitters. (In case you’re wondering how they managed this feat: to trap a bear, try luring it with bacon, pineapple juice, or, of course, honey.) After the stunned bears were kitted out with transmitters, they were allowed to continue on their way. But the Craigheads were now able to follow the lumbering mammals by using a radio receiver to tune into the signals issuing forth from their collars.36 As Frank Craighead recounted in his book:

Beep, beep, beep, full of portent and meaning, the repetitive metallic pulse came in loud and clear on the crisp autumn air. The sound had nothing of wildness about it. No deep primitive instinct of the chase stirred in us at the sound, nor did it evoke a feeling of oneness with nature. Yet this beeping coming to us in the vastness of Hayden Valley thrilled us as few sounds ever had. The vibrant pulsing signal, though new to the Yellowstone wilderness, told us that we were in communication with the grizzly we identified as bear Number 40, just as surely as the distant honking told us that the Canada geese were on the wing. But the beep was more specific than the honk of the goose or the guttural caw of the raven, for it emanated from one particular grizzly bear somewhere within the three thousand square miles of the park.

The technology opened up a whole new way of interacting with the wild world, and the Craigheads’ project – one of the first large-scale uses of radio collars – signalled the birth of the modern era of wildlife tracking.

But radio transmitters weren’t much use to the era’s marine biologists, in part because radio waves don’t travel well through salt water. But these scientists didn’t want to be left out of the tracking revolution that the Craigheads and others were launching on land, and during the 1960s and ’70s, they started developing their own instruments. The first attempts were slapdash; one scientist measured the diving behaviour of a Weddell seal with a pressure gauge and a wind-up kitchen timer. But biologists and engineers stuck with it, eventually creating devices that recorded information about marine mammals’ dives over the course of days and months. They also started following fish using acoustic tags, which emitted sound waves that could be detected by underwater microphones mounted to boats. The sound waves, alas, didn’t travel very far, so scientists had to trail fish closely in order to stay in range.

Over the following decades, advances in computing made wildlife tags smaller and more powerful. The development of satellite technology presented exciting new options; tags that communicate with satellites allow biologists to sit comfortably in their labs while zeroing in on a distant animal’s exact location on the globe. We now have a burgeoning supply of sophisticated electronic tags, some smaller than a jelly bean, that can keep tabs on wild animals for months or years at a time. These devices are proving to be especially valuable for learning about life in the ocean; marine biologists can’t go sit in the middle of the sea and watch the fish stream in the same way that Jane Goodall peered through the thick forests of Tanzania to study her beloved chimps. By bolting a tracking device to a shark’s fin or implanting one in a tuna’s belly, we landlubbers are gaining intimate access to the lives of ocean animals.

And not a moment too soon, considering that our oceans are in crisis. Heavy fishing, pollution and climate change are all making life difficult for the species that dwell in the sea. Populations of marine animals – fish, mammals, reptiles and birds – have declined by an average of 89 percent from their historical highs. The latest generation of electronic tags are a powerful weapon in the battle to keep wildlife healthy and thriving, particularly for the marine biologists whose subjects are so slippery.

Between 2000 and 2009, for instance, a team of California scientists used a slew of electronic tags to follow the movements of 1791 marine animals from twenty-three different species. The venture, known as the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project, helped researchers discover new migration pathways and marine hot spots – Goldilocks-like ‘just right’ regions of the ocean where many species converge.37 ‘When we start to understand how animals use the environment’, says Randy Kochevar, a marine biologist at Stanford University who was one of the principal investigators of the TOPP programme, ‘it puts us in a much better position to make informed decisions about how to manage and protect those populations’.

TOPP was a hugely ambitious demonstration of the potential of marine tagging, but it was also a mere jumping off point. TOPP has morphed from a local endeavour into an international one (called Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators, or GTOPP), and scientists are constantly dreaming up new tracking projects. As the latest generation of tagged animals go about their daily lives, the computers fastened to their bodies are doing more than simply recording their movements – they’re also collecting data about the ocean and its changing conditions. In this way, electronic tags are shifting animals’ roles from passive research subjects to active creature collaborators – and, perhaps, partners in saving their own watery worlds.

For us two-legged, land-walking, air-breathing brutes, it’s all too easy to overlook ocean life. I know I have. In all my years eating spicy tuna rolls, I had never – not once – stopped to consider the animal at the end of my chopsticks. Standing in the Tuna Research and Conservation Center (TRCC) in Monterey, California, however, it’s all I can think about. The centre, jointly operated by Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, is essentially a big ware house, and most of the floor space is taken up by three large round tanks. Resembling enormous kiddie pools, they are filled with 680,000 litres of seawater and dozens of bluefin tuna.

It’s no wonder I’ve got Japanese food on my mind. Bluefin have a bright pink flesh that is highly coveted for sushi and sashimi, and the fish can fetch staggering sums: in 2012, a 269-kilogram specimen sold for 56.49 million yen (about £470,000) at a Tokyo fish market – more than £1751 per kilogram. This is the first time I’ve seen living bluefin, and they are magnificent animals, beefy and muscular, and yet, somehow, lithe. Silver and glistening, they look like enormous bullets. They thrash their tails back and forth with such energy that their tanks quake, and choppy waves travel across the water’s surface.

These big bruisers are just babies, two and three years old; bluefin can live for thirty years and grow to be four metres long and nine hundred kilograms. They are strong and fast, able to reach speeds of forty-five miles (or seventy-two kilometres) per hour and traverse entire oceans in a matter of weeks. (Tuna have huge geographic ranges, spending time everywhere from South America to Norway). Their fins retract, giving them exceedingly streamlined bodies, and they are warm-blooded, which makes them oddities in the fish world but keeps them toasty as they cruise through icy waters.

Bluefin tuna swim so fast, far and deep that it has been difficult to learn about their lives in the wild. Marine biologists use satellite transmitters to track sharks, seals and turtles, which spend time near the ocean surface, but tuna live beyond the reach of satellites.38 So scientists had to develop an alternative solution. In the 1990s, they realized that they could take advantage of the fact that tuna are commercially harvested and outfit the fish with tags that store location information for later, rather than transmitting it in real time. The idea was that when a fisherman landed a tuna equipped with one of these ‘archival tags’, he could remove the device and return it to researchers. The fisherman would get a financial reward for his service, and the biologists would get weeks, months or years of detailed data that would enable them to reconstruct the tuna’s path.

Barbara Block, a Stanford marine biologist who directs the TRCC, helped pioneer the archival tagging of tuna, and she has used hundreds of the devices to follow the migrations of fish in the Atlantic and Pacific. To deploy the tags, Block and her team head out to sea, where they often brave stormy weather as they fish for tuna that can outweigh them by hundreds of kilograms. Once they’ve wrestled one of these giants into the boat, they lay it on the deck, cover its eyes with a wet towel, and use a hose to irrigate its gills with seawater. One team member makes a three-to-four-centimetre incision in the tuna’s side and places an archival tag inside the abdominal cavity. The tag is a marvel of miniature engineering. It crams a multitude of electronics into a small stainless-steel cylinder approximately the size of a tube of lipstick. It contains a suite of environmental sensors, a microprocessor, a tiny battery and enough memory to store years’ worth of data.39 The whole thing weighs in at forty-five grams and can operate more than 1.5 kilometres below the ocean’s surface, at temperatures below freezing. Tucked inside the tuna’s belly, the tag will measure the fish’s depth and internal body temperature as it swims.

When the researchers sew the fish back up, they leave the tag’s ‘stalk’, a long, thin tube attached to the metal cylinder, jutting outside the tuna’s body. This stalk contains sensors that will measure the water temperature and level of ambient light as the fish steams across the ocean. The scientists also attach a brightly coloured ‘streamer tag’ to the outside of the fish, which will alert fishermen that there’s a bounty on the electronic device hidden inside. The lucky fishermen who end up with these tuna in their boats can remove the implants, contact the scientists and return the tags for payouts of as much as $1,000 per fish. (‘Big $$$ reward’, as the streamer tag says.) All this poking, prodding and tagging takes less than three minutes. The team then pushes the fish out of the boat’s ‘tuna door’, sending it gliding down a wet blue tarp into the ocean.

It could be weeks, months or years before the fish is caught and the tag makes its way to Block and her colleagues. Once they have the device in hand, the scientists download all the data it’s been collecting. They use a combination of readings, including those from light, water temperature and time sensors, to calculate the fish’s latitude and longitude on a given day. By stringing these locations together over the course of many days, they make highly detailed maps of each tuna’s aquatic wanderings. Block constructs these tuna trails for a variety of projects and programmes. Since the mid-1990s, she has been tracking Atlantic tuna under the auspices of a research-and-conservation programme known as Tag-A-Giant. For a decade, she tracked Pacific tuna for TOPP, and she now heads its successor, GTOPP. But all roads lead back to the TRCC, where Block and her colleagues study tuna biology, test out new tagging technology and refine the techniques they use in the wild.

As I tour the facility, I run into Alex Norton, the facility’s scruffy blond, visor-clad tuna manager. He holds his elbow out to me expectantly. Since the staff here often have wet, fishy hands, he says, the mode of greeting consists of elbow bumps. I angle my funny bone towards Norton and officially make his acquaintance.

Norton tells me that I’ve arrived just in time for a tuna feeding, and he enlists me to help. I don some gloves and climb up a ladder to a plank suspended just below the ceiling. I crouch and shimmy down the plank until I’m squatting directly over a tank of tuna. Norton follows behind. We start doling out the multicourse meal, dropping the offerings into the pool below us. First up, an amuse-bouche of vitamins, then a main course of squid and, for dessert, a tuna favourite: a bucket of fatty, oily sardines. It is a true feeding frenzy, the tuna zooming to the surface to snatch up the proffered delectables.

I ask Norton how a self-described ‘surfer dude’ who waxes poetic about the beauty of the musculature of a tuna in motion feels about implanting electronics inside such impressive marine specimens. He says he doesn’t think the instruments themselves physically harm the fish, but he has imagined what the psychological experience of being tagged must be like for a tuna. ‘You think of it as this alien-abduction scenario’, he says. ‘You’re swimming along and you eat something that looks wonderful. All of a sudden you’re dragged toward this big giant thing – you know, it would be like a tractor beam, pulling you in – and then you go onto the mother ship, where they probe you, insert something and chuck you back!’

It doesn’t sound like a pleasurable experience, and tagging and tracking have long attracted controversy. In the 1960s, for instance, wilderness activists raised philosophical objections to the Craigheads’ bear-tracking project. To these critics, radio collars represented an unwelcome human intrusion into the natural world. Other activists of the era were more concerned about animal welfare, worrying that big, bulky transmitters would cause discomfort, irritation and pain.

Although tracking devices have evolved considerably since the 1960s, scientists still grapple with the effects of their instruments. Making even a small change to the body of a wild creature can have a big impact on survival and reproduction. In some studies, for example, penguins wearing time-depth recorders or radio transmitters took longer to find food and had higher rates of chick mortality. Researchers speculate that the devices interfered with the birds’ streamlined silhouettes, increasing drag while they were swimming, and thus the amount of energy they had to expend. In certain species of fish, tagging has been associated with slower swimming speeds and growth rates, as well as muscle damage and scale loss at the site of attachment.

Surgically implanted tags can cause pain or lead to infections, while external ones can cause sores; biologists have documented cases in which the harnesses used to attach transmitters to sea turtles caused abrasions and tissue damage. Tracking devices can also attract predators, alter an animal’s social status, or make it less desirable to potential mates. Poorly placed tags can snag on trees or brush and interfere with an animal’s ability to swim, walk or fly. Simply being caught and handled by humans can be traumatic, causing spikes in heart rate, respiration, body temperature and the production of stress hormones, and leave animals susceptible to various diseases and pathogens.

These possibilities are problematic for animal welfare reasons, but also for scientific ones. We’re tracking animals to learn more about them, and if the tag itself alters behaviour, physiology or survival, the data will be distorted, if not totally useless. So biologists who want to minimize the effects of tracking devices have to carefully consider countless variables. They must think through the physical and behavioural characteristics of an animal when deciding what kind of tag to use, where to place it, and how to attach it. Where, when and how an animal is caught, restrained, handled and released also matter. Some tags may be totally innocuous – for every study documenting the devices’ adverse effects, there’s another that shows tagged animals doing just dandy – but an ill-conceived one could be a death sentence.

It’s not easy to perform controlled, long-term studies on how tags affect animal welfare, since it’s difficult to get data on untagged animals as a point of comparison. So Block and her colleagues have tested out different tag shapes, attachment strategies and surgical techniques with captive tuna. They implanted archival tags in tuna living at the TRCC and monitored the fish for months. The wounds healed well, and the only noticeable side effect was some ‘minor irritation’ where the light-sensing stalk protruded from their bodies.

For all the discussion of how tags can harm animals, there’s not much talk about how such devices could benefit them. Exhibit A: TurtleWatch, a programme designed to protect loggerhead turtles, the giant, long-lived reptiles classified as ‘endangered’ or ‘threatened’ in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. The loggerheads that live in the northern Pacific nest in Japan and Australia but make yearly migrations across the open ocean, using their brown-and-white speckled flippers to paddle their way to the shores of the Golden State. Though the turtles aren’t commercially harvested, they can swallow hooks or get tangled in lines set out by fishermen.

This ‘bycatch’ of loggerheads is a problem for both the turtles and the fishermen. US regulations stipulate that the longline swordfish and tuna fishery operating around Hawaii cannot accidentally hook more than seventeen loggerheads annually. That’s a collective total for all the boats working in the area – after someone snags the year’s seventeenth turtle, all the fishermen must return to shore for the rest of the calendar year. In 2006, the fishery reached this limit unusually early – in March – and had to cease operations until the next year.

After that season, which was catastrophic for the fishing industry, Jeffrey Polovina and Evan Howell, both oceanographers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, established TurtleWatch to reduce the turtle bycatch. Polovina, Howell and their colleagues had already used satellite transmitters to track young loggerheads, and they’d discovered that the reptiles preferred water in a narrow temperature range: between 17.5 and 18.5 degrees Celsius. The loggerheads also spent most of their time cruising around a region of the Pacific where large systems of marine currents converge; all sorts of buoyant, gelatinous critters pile up amidst this churn and swirl of seawater, providing easy pickings for hungry turtles.

Polovina and Howell decided to use this information to predict where turtles might be on a particular day and encourage fishermen to avoid that area entirely. Since December 2006, that’s what they’ve been doing under TurtleWatch. Every day, Howell examines the latest data on sea surface temperature and ocean currents and produces a map of the fishing grounds, using thick black lines to mark off regions where conditions will be especially turtle-friendly. The maps, which are produced in English, Vietnamese and Korean, advise fishermen to avoid setting their lines in these areas and are dispatched daily to fisheries managers and individual boats. Since the programme began, the fishery has never hit its maximum number of loggerhead encounters.40

The TurtleWatch approach doesn’t make sense for species that fishermen want to catch, such as tuna. But there are ways that we can use tracking data to help protect the overexploited tuna populations. Since the early 1980s, fishermen have been subject to strict quotas; the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) sets limits on how many kilograms of bluefin can be pulled out of the water each year. ICCAT manages the Atlantic bluefin population by literally drawing a line down the middle of the ocean and treating the fish on each side as a distinct population. To the west of the line are tuna that breed in the Gulf of Mexico, while the eastern population breeds in the Mediterranean Sea. The western population, which has declined by more than 90 percent since 1970, is much smaller than the eastern one, so the quotas on the American side of the Atlantic are much more stringent.

It’s a reasonable system, provided the fish stick to their side of the ICCAT line. ‘Well, when we started tagging and tracking bluefin tuna’, says Randy Kochevar, the Stanford marine biologist, ‘one of the first things we realized is that nobody told them about this line down the middle of the ocean’. Kochevar works in Block’s lab, where researchers have been following the trails of Atlantic bluefin for more than a decade. Their tracking data reveals that in the spring and summer, the fish do indeed segregate themselves – a tuna born in the Gulf of Mexico will return to the Gulf to breed. During the rest of the year, however, the fish use communal foraging grounds spread across the Atlantic. And as soon as the western tuna cross over the invisible ICCAT line, they can be harvested at a much higher rate. This finding helps explain why western tuna populations aren’t bouncing back and points the way to better management plans. Block’s team, for instance, has suggested establishing a new ICCAT zone, in the shared central Atlantic foraging grounds, governed by a strict catch quota. In this way, data from tuna tracking studies could be used to craft fisheries plans that lead to real recovery.41

As marine tracking matured, oceanographers realized that they could piggyback on biologists’ tagging projects to learn about the sea itself. That’s what happened when Michael Fedak, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews started tagging southern elephant seals. The blubbery behemoths – males can weigh in at more than 1,800 kilograms – spend their lives in one of the most inaccessible places on the planet, enjoying winter in the frigid Antarctic waters. Some of the deepest divers on Earth, the mammals can descend more than a mile beneath the surface to hunt for dinner. The seals spend a few months every year on the beach, where they molt and breed, but when they slip back into the water, Fedak says, ‘they might as well be going off to another galaxy’.

Eager to learn more about these seals’ habitats, Fedak outfitted the animals with tags that would measure the basic physical characteristics of the water in which they were diving. Between 2003 and 2007, Fedak and his British, French, Australian and American collaborators glued multifunction tags to the hairy heads of 102 elephant seals.42 Whenever an elephant seal dove beneath the surface, the gadget whirred away, measuring the water’s pressure, temperature and salinity at regular intervals. When the seal surfaced, the tag’s satellite transmitter sent the data back to the lab. According to Fedak, the sensors in the tag are essentially identical to those that oceanographers lower into the sea from a ship, ‘except stuck on something hairy and warm’.

In fact, as the numbers started trickling in, Fedak realized that oceanographers were eager to see the information his seals were collecting. ‘These guys needed this data for this much grander job of understanding how the ocean behaves’, he says. Oceanographers are now using the temperature, salinity and pressure readings from the seals’ deep dives to construct detailed profiles of entire vertical columns of water. Because the animals routinely plunge under ice caps, where ships can’t navigate, they are illuminating parts of the planet that have, until now, been complete blind spots. Among other things, tagged elephant seals have revealed previously undiscovered troughs at the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean. These valleys, which can funnel warm water under ice caps, may explain why some ice shelves have been melting faster than expected. Today, marine mammals have collected 70 percent of the Antarctic Ocean data in the World Ocean Database, and the US Integrated Ocean Observing System is working to incorporate data collected by all sorts of tagged swimmers into its models of ocean conditions.

Ice melt is just the beginning – global warming is raising water temperatures and levels, and changing its acidity and salinity. Experts are also predicting long-term changes in precipitation, storm frequency and ocean currents and circulation. These shifts are already having profound effects on marine life. As waters warm, many species of fish are moving towards the planet’s poles, and there have been shifts in the distribution and availability of various nutrients and food sources, including plankton, the floating organisms that are central to many marine food webs. Scientists have, in turn, linked changes in prey availability to findings that porpoises are taking longer to mature, seals are giving birth later in the year, and whales are having fewer calves. Of course, some species are adapting to our warming world, but those that fail to adjust quickly enough could find themselves staring down the barrel of extinction.

Data from tagged elephant seals and other marine animals will help us monitor, forecast and prepare for the drastic environmental shifts that threaten ocean life and predict what will happen to animals as the seas change. For example, scientists have used tags to estimate a seal’s buoyancy, an indirect measure of body fat. A fat elephant seal is a thriving, well-fed elephant seal, and by using buoyancy, location and other tag data, scientists can construct maps of where elephant seals find food and what ocean conditions are like there. ‘We can then run models around where those kinds of places might be in the future and how far away they are from where animals might breed’, Fedak says. ‘It’s the beginning of asking questions about how oceanographic changes might affect populations, of saying, “Well, if things do shift . . . what will happen to the beasts?” ’ The latest generation of tags and sensors are turning elephant seals and other marine animals into more than scientific subjects. ‘We’re making colleagues of the animals’, Fedak says. ‘There really is an opportunity for us to understand the ocean not only for our reasons but for them as well. The animals and us are all in this together.’

Tagging technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and tracking projects are proliferating. Several years ago, scientists launched the Ocean Tracking Network, a £100 million project based at Canada’s Dalhousie University. It’s a collaboration of more than two hundred scientists in fifteen nations that aims to follow the movements of thousands of marine animals, from seals to eels, all over the globe. The project relies on acoustic tags, which emit pulses of sound that can be detected by underwater receivers. The basic technology has been in use for decades, but the Ocean Tracking Network is taking it to the next level by installing arrays of underwater ‘listening stations’, capable of picking up the signals of any tagged animal that happens to swim past, along the ocean floor. The receivers, which are the approximate size of fire extinguishers, record the animal’s presence, upload any data that’s been stored in its tag and relay the information to researchers. So far, OTN technicians have set up hundreds of these receivers on the seabed off the Canadian coast, with smaller deployments near Australia and South Africa. The goal is to establish similar arrays in all the world’s oceans.

New kinds of tags are providing even more detailed information about the daily lives of ocean animals. A team of Hawaiian biologists, for example, gave Galápagos sharks electronic ‘business cards’, acoustic tags capable of detecting other tagged sharks and recording when the predators encountered one another in the wild. Widespread use of these devices could help us learn more about how different individuals and species share the marine environment. A number of other labs are using tags that measure acceleration to determine when a shark is mating or a sea lion is hunting for fish.

Scientists who track deep-sea fish are beginning to deploy a second kind of device, known as a ‘pop-up’ satellite tag, alongside their archival instruments. When attached to the outside of a fish, these pop-up tags collect and store the usual information about temperature, light and depth. After a predetermined number of days, the tag automatically detaches from the fish and floats to the surface, where it sends its stored data to satellites. These tags are bigger, heavier and more expensive than archival implants, and because of slow transmission speeds, they can transmit only small amounts of data. But prices and sizes are dropping, and the technology is being used on a variety of large fish, including swordfish, marlin and tuna. (Barbara Block, who piloted the use of these devices with bluefin tuna, employs both pop-up tags and archival ones in her tracking studies.)

As electronic tags shrink to near invisibility, it’s becoming possible to track an ever-expanding menagerie of marine and terrestrial species. A Canadian company sells a radio transmitter that is smaller than a fingernail and is practically weightless, at 0.25 grams. In 2010, researchers reported that they had used miniature tags to follow iridescent orchid bees as they flew through the tropical forests of Panama, and a group of Swedish scientists have shown that we may be able to track the movements of water fleas (Daphnia magna) – millimetre-sized, freshwater crustaceans – by attaching fluorescent nanoparticles to their tiny little shells.

Etienne Benson, the author of Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife, expresses mixed feelings about these advances. ‘We’re tracking everything’, he says. ‘Almost everywhere you go there is a committee of scientists or wildlife managers that is trying to manage the world. I think we can ask questions about what kind of world it is we’re creating where we want to manage and keep track of everything. All the time.’ Benson, a research scholar at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, says electronic tags appeal to us because they provide another way to bring the wild world under our control. The rise of the tracking devices in the first place was driven by the fact that, as Benson puts it, ‘Wildlife managers needed to make manageable wildlife.’ (The Craigheads’ research, after all, was spurred by a desire to keep grizzlies and humans away from each other.)

While Benson acknowledges that tracking devices can generate valuable data, he wonders whether we’re being seduced by our new tools: ‘Do we really think that if we put a tag on everything, we’re going to resolve problems of living harmoniously in nature or having a sustainable world of resources?’ he says. ‘It’s a kind of utopianism: “If we just get everything tagged, if we just get the right sensor network out there, then everything’s going to work fine.” ’

Clearly, just knowing the whereabouts of the world’s animals is not, in and of itself, a solution. We still have to use the information in the right way, and political and economic considerations often derail conservation. But if we want to protect animals, the more information we have about them and their habitats, the better. Plus, even Benson acknowledges that tracking devices have real benefits in another regard: public engagement. Tags that communicate with satellites allow scientists to broadcast the whereabouts of free-ranging animals online, in real time, for all of us to see, giving wild creatures their own pack of paparazzi. By providing closer encounters, even virtual ones, with other species, our electronic tools are bridging the divide between humans and animals.

TOPP researchers, for instance, conducted their own elephant seal tracking project and posted the seals’ whereabouts on a public website. There, an interactive map displayed each seal’s individual journey in the Pacific. I started checking in on the animals, cheering on the males as they travelled up the Pacific coast and worrying as the seal mums slid off into the dark night, abandoning their month-old pups for good. It was high drama on the high seas, and I devoured updates as if they were Facebook posts from my closest friends. (As luck would have it, the TOPP team set up Facebook accounts for some of its seals.)

I developed a particular soft spot for a loser male the researchers had named Jonathan Sealwart. The elephant seal, I learned, is at the bottom of the social totem pole and sleeps all alone on a California beach. He has no harem of admiring lady seals and may go his entire life without mating. He certainly can’t rely on his looks; he has what must be one of the world’s most hideous animal faces, with a droopy proboscis that appears to be melting off his face. To add insult to injury, Jon Sealwart has far fewer Facebook friends than the seal named another Comedy Central TV colleague, Stelephant Colbert.

TOPP isn’t alone; projects tracking everything from albatrosses to sea turtles have made the animal world accessible to us online at all hours of the day. ‘You see conservation organizations and scientists all trying to forge connections using these technologies’, Benson says, ‘to really give people insight into the everyday lives of nonhuman animals in a way that wasn’t possible before. That can be tremendously valuable.’

Even the act of assigning animals proper names – something that usually goes hand in hand with following the travels of specific individuals – can help us form emotional attachments to them. (Pets are named but laboratory animals almost never are.) Thanks to proper names, I could do more than learn about the general characteristics of elephant seals; I could forge a bond with Mr. Sealwart, a specific seal with a unique history and personality. As Sune Borkfelt, a scholar at Denmark’s Aarhus University, wrote in a 2011 paper, ‘[G]iving an animal a name does often draw it closer to us’. Assigning names to individual animals can remind us that they are sentient subjects of their own lives, rather than mere objects, and it can highlight what we have in common with other species, rather than what sets us apart. Coming to know just a few wild individuals could prompt attachment and affection for an entire species and make us more invested in safeguarding their habitats and their futures. Tagging-and-tracking technology is helping us learn more about marine animals and the risks they face, simultaneously making us want to protect these creatures and giving us the knowledge we need to actually do so. Jonathan Sealwart may be a loser in the world of seals, but thanks to a little electronic device glued to his head, he’s got a gang of human friends – more than five hundred of them, according to Facebook – and we, at least, are rooting for him.