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Science Technology

Mobile Phones for Geese and Seals 93

Posted by timothy from the roaming-charges-apply dept.
prostoalex writes: "BBC News has two related articles about mobile phones and messaging being introduced to the animal world. The stories, aptly named Geese 'phone' home and Seals 'phone' home (kudos from this-title-is-so-original dept.) talk about 'tagged' animals that report about their location via the cellular systems. And if seal tracking is available only to the scientists in the field, following the geese online is open to anyone who contributes .75 British pounds to the research project."
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Mobile Phones for Geese and Seals More

Mobile Phones for Geese and Seals

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  • Quack

    Quack Carrot Top Quack?

    QUAAAAACK
    • seems appropriate, considering yesterday's report of a theiving primate... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F news%2F2002%2F06%2F11%2Fnchimp11.xml ...who stole amoungst other things a moblie phone. what implcations does this have for the future? and will it add legitmacy to the arguement...'but my dog stole the essay?'
  • Just imagine the work required to teach geese to dial the right number.
  • Interesting. I wonder what else they can track? Put one in your pet to know where it goes. Put one in yer teenagers car to see where it goes. Put one under your skin to see where you go....or have it done...

    • Almost already being done. Check out this family [go.com] that decided to have chip implants put into everyone. Sure, it may only contain certain medical data and whatnot currently, but how much would you be betting to wager that when one of the kids becomes lost, the designers don't inform the parents of the "hidden tracking feature"?

      We have everyone means to do the exact same thing with humans as we are doing with animals, and with quite an amount of ease. The only barrier is on the enforcement end of things, trying to get people to take the implants (if they haven't gassed us all and given us them anyhow, lol) and keep them without hassle (i.e. tearing at your own skin :\).

  • The geese are shitting on my lawn. They will be airborne and moving elsewhere in a minute.
  • Well, now I finally realize at whom all those "Collect Calling" ads are targeted. Surely any life-form high than a goose would not be swayed to use a service promoted by Carrot Top.
  • Aparently since everyone on the planet already has a call phone or two, the wireless companies have finally realised to move on to other species.

    Brillant! However, I am concerned that they chose whales and geese.....maybe they're easy to sucker into long contracts!

  • What about the penguins! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Caractacus Potts ( 74726 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @03:55AM (#3677946)

    I'll contribute 50 pounds if they include penguins in the program. Think of the publicity we'd get with a wired mascot! Oh, how about another 100 if they include a gnu.

    • 11:04am : Begin monitoring. Gnu in Region 3 of wildlife preserve.

      11:35am : Gnu position remains unchanged

      1:22 pm : Gnu position remains unchanged

      4:25 pm : Gnu is defecating

      4:26 pm : A non-identified human has entered wildlife preserve

      4:26 pm : Human seems to be calling gnu

      4:27 pm : Gnu approaching human in Region 4 of wildlife preserve

      4:27 pm : Gnu acting oddly

      5:12 pm : Police entering wildlife preserve

      5:14 pm : Man being arrested. Man protesting loudly

      5:27 pm : Police identify man as Richard M. Stallman

      5:30 pm : Police charge man with illegal entry and 3 counts of animal cruelty

      5:30 pm : Gnu returns to Region 3 of wildlife preserve

      8:29 pm : Gnu is sleeping. Position unchanged

  • phone bills (Score:2, Funny)

    by cdf12345 ( 412812 )
    I bet those roaming charges are going to suck!

  • Not much in English though, but here [ilrecycling.com] is the web page with a little in English.

    The transmitters on the other two seals have broken, but you can see the old tracks for them.

  • Technology really is amazing. No more phoney decoys; no more phoney animal sound immitations. Just take your cell phone with you on the hunt, dial 08000-GOOSE and listen for the ring ... aim .... FIRE!!!!

  • ...whatever happened to the prime directive?
  • Can you hear me now? QUACK! Can you hear me now? dan QUACK!

  • WWT website (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Chris_Keene ( 87914 )
    The BBC link to this [wwt.org.uk] page, which provides some more maps of the birds progress.

    All the birds take the same route from Iceland to Greenland, even though they took the journey at different times. On the 4th of June Arnthor was well ahead of the pack (okay okay so it's not a race but), but by the 10th of June, it was clear he/she had decided to have a few days break on the edge of Greenland while Hugh and Kerry had a few days break. Also intresting is that these two birds both arrived on the same island, and it looks like they arrived at the same time, but at opposite ends of the island.

    This could be a new sport, taking bets on which bird gets to Canada first - with daily web updates. More exciting than the football.

  • following the geese online is open to anyone who contributes .75 pounds to the research project.

    Pounds of what?

  • DateLine: circa 1942, the northern most tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. At a top secret location a specially trained cadre of experts carefully sweep the NorthWest Pacific skies for signs of the awaited Japanese invasion. Their cutting edge technology: RADAR. Early one morning the first wave of Zeros shows on the RADAR screen and the word is sent out: the invasion has begun... well almost... that was until the first wave of Zeros showed itself to be a flock of Canadian Geese. Now we can just call their service and check their flight plans.

    A log cabin remains, with a plaque commemorating the brave souls who spent the war, huddled over bleeding edge technology muttering... airplane?...goose?

  • Does this have anything to do ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by vrassoc ( 581619 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:35AM (#3678020)
    ...with the sticker on my cell phone that says Warranty void if seal is broken???

  • Why do the geese need mobile phones when they could more easily have adapted the well known RFC 1149 [ietf.org] protocol?
  • ok, so its slightly OT, but along the same lines:


    Some guy at National Geographic [nationalgeographic.com] has been attaching camcorders he calls CritterCams [usgs.gov] to the backs of sea turtles, sharks, and other shit that swims around in hard to reach places (no comment).

    You cant track them online, but it would make for one trippy-as-hell video to project on a wall at a party.
    peace***
  • For .75 pounds, no more sitting around, waiting and getting liquored up while bird hunting
  • Has any thought been given to how difficult it would be for poachers to "hack" this system and use it to track the seals for their own goals, which are usually exactly opposite those of the researchers?

    Imagine if the poachers could simply trigger the SMS system and then triangulate on the position of the largest closest herd of seals.
  • From the article:

    The sponsorship, which costs £75 a year, is the latest conservation scheme tied to mobile phones.

    Thats 75 pounds not .75 (as in 75 pence) as the /. story states. Not sure if i'm willing to put up quite that much. maybe a fiver....

    • At the time of submitting it to Slashdot the number on BBC site had a dot in it, since I contemplated spending a buck myself. Of course with 75 pound upfront fee things start looking different.
  • The government is installing involuntary tracking devices in order to monitor their location and movement remotely? Has anyone addressed the privacy concerns of this plan?

    --
    "First they came for the geese and seals, but I was not a goose or seal, so I said nothing."
  • Interesting that another story, also on BBC's website talks about how cellphones are endangering the gorilla [bbc.co.uk], because they use the rare mineral coltan.

    I guess we really need to keep track of those geese and seals, though!

  • The 'satellite telemetry' link on the St Andrew's University Sea Mammal Research Group [st-and.ac.uk] site gives more information about the technical aspects of the seal tracking: messages limited to just 32 bytes so much of the time only summary information is sent (out-of-water times, dive times) with option to get more details of selected dives.

    (And we find 56kB/sec slow....)

  • Only the seals are using mobile phone tech (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ukryule ( 186826 ) <slashdot&yule,org> on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @05:27AM (#3678123) Homepage
    The technical info about the Seals is available here [st-and.ac.uk]. To quote:

    The study will be split into two phases. In phase one, simple mobile phone tags will regularly send text messages from grey seal pups to computers at the University, allowing scientists to examine which factors affect their survival through their first year. In phase two, GPS (Global Positioning System) and depth sensors will be added, allowing, through GPRS, (General Packet Radio Service) massive volumes of detailed track and dive behaviour to be sent ashore.


    However, the Geese are actually using a satellite tracking system (as described in not much detail here) [wwt.org.uk]. The text message bit is just an advertising thing that the WWT will send you an SMS when they get data - which is nothing new technically.

    I'd be interested in the battery requirements for both of them though - I've got this image in my head of a seal trying to wind up a charger [slashdot.org] ...
  • "Can you still hear me?"

    "Quack."

    "Goooood."

    Repeat until desired effect achieved.
  • I live in Finland, and it is possible to get spammed with about any content you can imagine. During year 2001, 1.2 billion sms messages were sent in Finland. With Finland's 5.2 million citizens, that means 230 messages per person during last year. And that includes infants, and those who are over 65 years old (there is 760 000 of them, 15.6%).
    So for us, the mobile messaging is not a buzzword anymore. It is the default. And in addition to this wireless notification aspect, this was an article, that I would have thought to see on WWF's site and not Slashdot :)
  • ..and these animals can call while flying and swimming? I guess my ATT&T service needs the help of that Verizon guy that walks around asking... "Can you hear me now? Good!"
    Can you hear me now?

    Goooood!
  • but can't find bin Laden?
  • Now if we could train them to use the little handcranks, viola !! (Come on, this one was obvious)
  • On the flipside of the cute animals/mobile phone issue is another story being run by the BBC [bbc.co.uk] about how extraction of the mineral coltan in the Congo is endangering local wildlife - see this story [bbc.co.uk]. Coltan is used in pinhead capacitors.

    Just a reminder I guess that new technology often impacts on the environment in unexpected ways, especially when novel components are used. What's more worrying is that your mobile phone may have helped fund warlords in Africa to continue a bitter civil war. The technology doesn't seem quite so cool now, does it?

  • My wife Starflower and I once actually succeeded in reading the tag numbers off a pair of live, conscious Canadian Geese. Believe me, it wasn't easy. We discovered that Canadian Geese are a lot like programmers: they can be bribed with food. The father goose was easy... he wanted the food and was willing to get close. Mother goose was harder: she was more wary of us, and to make matters worse, her tag was upside down. Her tactic worked: she got a lot more food.
  • sounds like a good application for the Automatic Position Reporting System [navy.mil] (ham radio GPS tracking system) which even has satellite coverage [navy.mil] with a few passes/day for much of the world... (even via the ISS)

    wouldn't need to be on any cellular network to send the data. (tho, if you weren't in a populated area with any APRS internet gateways, you'd need to do some more complicated math to figure out if a sat was overhead to send through).

  • I always wondered how the tagged animals look at and are looked upon by the other animals?

    Is it a "Ha ha...you got your ass tagged" or a "wow...that's so cool that you were selected" kinda mentality.
  • Animals only "phone home" if they are fitted with spyware/malware products (a la RealDownload Demon).

  • Non-stop, twenty-four hours a day, baby seals calling in yelling and screaming:

    Help! Help! There's a man coming toward me, he's got a club in his hand. Help! My co-ordinates are--humpph.

  • Great, just what I need now!

    I get cutoff from bandwdith problems already, now I've gotta compete seals and geese?

    What's next, the seals and geese working tech support?

    ring, ring, ring... uh yes hi, I have a problem with my cellphone bill...
    quack?
    No, I don't wanna hold!!!
    *music plays*
    Those damn geese always putting me on hold!!!

  • ...this is much much better.

    Loading the gun...

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