The vultures of Britain’s International Centre for Birds of Prey don’t know it, but they’re dupes. Every day, the giant birds carefully tend to their eggs, rotating them periodically so they incubate *just *right. But...take a closer look at that nest. Not every egg in there is made of calcium carbonate, and they don't always contain baby birds.
No, at this conservation center, some of those eggs are actually 3-D printed. And they're packed with a bounty that may be more precious to the vultures than an actual embryo: sensors.
Really, it’s for their own good. Many vulture species are in serious trouble, and captive breeding programs like the one at ICBP may be the bird's only hope of beating extinction. But fostering those baby vultures in captivity is *hard. *Incubation may seem simple, but it's a careful balance of temperature, humidity, and movement that conservationists are just beginning to understand. So to help get a better picture of the process, ICBP developed its 3-D printed vulture egg, filled with sensor guts from tech partner Microduino.
Add a name like EggDuino (yes, yes) and it begins to sound a bit, well, daft. But in fact it’s emblematic of a massive shift in the way conservationists are going about their work. More and more, sensors in vulture nests or camera traps in rainforests (alternatively: cameras strapped to tree kangaroos to see the canopy as they see it) or drones in the sky are doing the data-gathering scientists have always had to do by hand. And all that's great---as long as the lights and clicks and whirs don't spook those data points away.
Vultures face peril like no other group of birds, particularly in Africa. There, farmers are poisoning dead cattle to take out scavengers like lions—taking out other, harmless scavengers like vultures in the process. To protect vultures on the brink, conservationists are turning to captive breeding programs.
The problem is, egg incubation is a complex mixture of environmental and behavioral factors. “We don't know exactly what those temperatures are, the amount of turning that goes on, the humidity, everything else that goes on underneath the parent,” says Adam Bloch, a conservationist developing the electronic egg at the ICBP.
But you can’t simply drop a sensor in the nest and expect a vulture to not boot it right out. These 3-D printed eggs are shaped just right and have the same weight distribution as a normal egg, so the parent doesn’t grow suspicious as it rolls it around. As a serendipitous bonus, the texture of the 3-D printed nylon egg mimics that of the real thing.
Bloch's data could be a boon to conserving the vultures on his reserve. But it may be worthless for species in other parts of the world, which likely keep their eggs at different temperatures and humidities. (If it gets hot enough, vultures will actually rise up to shade their eggs.) So he wants to get this technology in the hands of conservation groups in Africa as well as India, a country with its own declining vulture populations. If you’ve got a 3-D printer, you’ve got eggs. Microduino will sell you the sensors for $200.
And for this electronic egg, vultures may just be the beginning. “It could also be used for eagles, it could be used for kites, it could be used for anything that has an egg,” Bloch says.
Let’s pull back a bit---say, 1,500 feet above a California wetland in 2014. Scientists with the Nature Conservancy are taking an evening drone flight, training the craft’s infrared camera on a flock of sandhill cranes.
In a state that’s lost damn near 100 percent of its wetlands to development, the birds that fly north and south along the so-called Pacific Flyway face unprecedented risk. To track the creatures, the researchers have traditionally counted them the old-fashioned way: with a pair of trusty binoculars. But with an overhead shot, the scientists get a wider field of view of the nesting cranes, which appear as black blobs against a white background.
But like an errant, poky sensor in their comfy nests, birds may not like having a drone watching their every move. Matt Merrifield, the Conservancy’s chief technology officer, knows for sure that hawks don’t appreciate them. “We had one situation actually where we had a red-tailed hawk come and punch one of these things out of the sky,” he says.
So scientists are working to feel out exactly how wildlife reacts to quadcopters—and tweak their methods to match. How close can you get to a sandhill crane, for instance, without spooking it? After all, it’s evolutionarily programmed to distrust things hovering above it, what with all the birds of prey about. The same cautions apply to studying mammalian subjects with quadcopters. One study found that black bears’ heart rates spiked as drones approached them.
With every new technology, researchers have to be careful not to disrupt the ecosystems they're trying to observe. Camera traps, for instance, are great at capturing wild critters, but a flash will of course alter the behavior of the subjects. The only new method unlikely to cause problems? Satellite imagery, used to track populations of blue whales and elephants and emperor penguins.
Despite the challenges, though, these new observational techniques are actually a step up from the ecological work of yore. “Fifty years ago it was all about being in the field and seeing the animal, maybe capturing it, maybe photographing it,” says conservation biologist Nathalie Pettorelli, who edits the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. “But we've gone from a relatively invasive way of looking at nature to a much less invasive way.”
Even the most mysterious ecosystem of all, the ocean, is slowly giving up its secrets. Researchers have unleashed autonomous robots that roam the Pacific Ocean collecting data like temperature and salinity---and collecting actual animals: plankton.
So from electronic eggs to drones to submersible bots, science is building a micro-to-macro monitoring network of the natural world. And done right, the network can suck in data without disturbing the wildlife it’s intended to protect.
