How to spy on animals—from low-Earth orbit
Project ICARUS's newly launched satellite aims to track animals across the globe on an unprecedented scale.
An innovative new project to continuously monitor thousands of animals at once is getting a boost with a new satellite in space.
Project ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) recently launched the second of two satellites that are crucial to its plan to gather granular data on the whereabouts of wildlife around the globe.
The latest satellite, which is partially funded by the National Geographic Society and carried out of Earth’s orbit by a SpaceX rocket, is the culmination of an idea that started around 20 years ago. As the project’s name indicates, researchers plan to conduct animal research from space. And as the project’s acronym suggests, it’s ambitious.
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Should it all go according to plan, scientists may be able to use the data from thousands of tracker-tagged animals to monitor diseases, predict natural disasters, understand how seed-dispersing birds influence forest canopies, keep an eye on poachers, and more.
“We had this vision 20, 25 years ago, and now it may finally come to fruition. Even for us, it’s hard to believe that this is the final month before everything should start working. It’s absolutely crazy,” says Martin Wikelski, director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and a National Geographic Explorer. “The world’s just open for lots and lots of discoveries.”
Phase One: Launching Earth-monitoring satellites
The first ICARUS monitoring technology was a large antenna affixed to the International Space Station in 2020. That antenna spent over a year gathering data from tagged birds like cuckoos and godwits and collected detailed data on their migrations. But when Germany and Russia dissolved a collaborative space program in 2022, ICARUS engineers took that time to create a lighter shoe-boxed sized payload that fits onto a satellite.
The first redesigned satellite was launched last November. Wikelski says the mission is so far going according to plan—that satellite is successfully in orbit and its operators can communicate with the payload on board—but Wikelski says logistical delays have prevented the team from sending and receiving data to and from animal tags: “It’s always a drama, space.”
Unlike the first satellite, which ferried four different payloads from other organizations into orbit, the second will only carry ICARUS technology. Wikelski says this will allow them to be nimbler than when sharing a satellite with other organizations.
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He describes ICARUS as fundamentally different from other satellite monitoring programs that track macro environmental trends like thousand-mile-long bird migrations, large algal blooms, or the gradual shrinking of a lake. In addition to monitoring where animals move, the tags can sense the subtle movements of an individual animal, and artificial intelligence will infer what an animal’s unusual movements suggest about health or environmental changes.
For instance, the tags can sense and transmit data indicating when a committee of vultures die—a possible sign of poachers poisoning an illicit carcass—or when pigs on a particular farm stop wiggling their ears, a possible sign of swine fever.
Phase Two: Connecting thousands of animals to the system
With two satellites in ICARUS’s orbit, now comes a second phase of boots-on-the-ground work. Around 3,000 tags are currently ready to be attached to 3,000 individual animals. Wikelski says that 3,000 more have been ordered with plans for additional tags in the coming years. It’s a baby step toward their goal of eventually monitoring 100,000 animals at once.
Soon, the ICARUS team will tag Rwandan fruit bats to learn more about their role in the ecosystem and how that might affect the region’s ability to withstand climate changes. They’ll also tag sooty tern birds in the Seychelles to look for early signs of typhoons, and Arctic terns in Iceland to search for insights into how climate change is altering their pole-to-pole migration. Later this year, ICARUS researchers plan to travel to Bhutan to look at the migratory patterns of cuckoos traveling from Tibet, and then to Bolivia to tag flamingos—a bird that nests at elevations of over 16,000 feet—to learn how they breed, die, and disperse across the Andes.
The biggest tags are around four grams and have tiny solar panels powering them. Smaller one-gram tags meant for little birds and insects are powered by batteries than can transmit data for about a year.
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What makes them easy to place on animals also makes them easy to hand out to their regional partners, says Wikelski. While the ICARUS team plans to tag hundreds of animals, they’re also relying on local wildlife experts to enthusiastically tag animals in their own parts of the world. Wikelski hopes word of mouth will help propel the project, saying one wildlife group in Spain might know another in Turkey and then as a result hundreds of birds are in the ICARUS matrix.
His critics, Wikelski says, have been antsy for the kinds of scientific breakthroughs the project has promised. He counters that novel ideas take years of effort.
“People are happy to do more of the same,” he says. “If you want to get a transformation going, it’s not the easiest time.”
But he sees this coming year as the culmination of endless planning: “It’s the dream of a lifetime, and now it may work.”
