An article in the Journal of Applied Ecology
came out last month entitled “Real-time anti-poaching tags could help preventimminent species extinctions”. The article opens up with the fact that many
large exotic animals are on their way to extinction. For example some
researchers believe that the elephant and the black rhino will go extinct by
2020. The article goes on to list an innovative, fast response system that will
help catch poachers. This new system is an electronic tag that will be placed
in the animal. This tag will give real-time information such as heartbeat,
location, and possibly even have a camera and microphone attachment to it. This
method will be more effective than previous tags because previous tags just
showed the animal’s location on a GPS. The old GPS was rife with problems one
of which was sleeping animals were misinterpreted as being dead.
This new tracking system will be a
fantastic poaching deterrent. Most incidents of poaching involve the poachers
escaping, but with the new electronic tags it will be almost impossible for the
poacher to escape. This is because if the animals heart rate stops there will
be an alert to park rangers who will come to investigate and catch the
poachers. Many national parks use helicopters so finding poachers will be a
breeze if alerted to their presence. The article suggests the use of unmannedaircraft (drones) to investigate an alert before sending in park rangers especially if
the park lacks helicopters. This alert will happen in less than ten seconds so
poachers will be unable to forcibly remove the device before the alarm is
triggered. With a high chance of the apprehension of poachers, poaching should
decrease significantly and bringing back the population of will be more likely.
The issue with this solution is that a
considerable amount of black rhinos will need to be tagged in order for this
new system to be effective. The issue is mitigated by the fact that the black
rhino is critically endangered so there isn’t too many that need to be tagged,
but never the less there are at least 4800 of them. This new type of
anti-poaching will work better on animals that are critically endangered rather
than animals that are just simply endangered.
O'Donoghue,
P., & Rutz, C. (2015). Real‐time anti‐poaching tags could help prevent imminent
species extinctions. Journal of Applied Ecology.
I think that this actually a very good way to combat against poachers. It's because that they won't have enough time to remove the horns after successfully killed those rhinos. And what is the point of killing the animals if they can't get their hands on those precious horns, while risk the chance of getting caught and doing time in jail. That would make poachers think twice before trying to carry out their shameful act.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting article. The only issue I could think of is battery life for the tags placed on the animals. Since it has a large possibility for function I would think that there would be a higher energy use. I am a big fan of the use of drones. I read a recent study of how animals behaved around drones and it seemed like most didn't even pay attention to an over head flying drone. The only animal that did notice the drone was a chimpanzee who unfortunately knocked it down and investigated it for a short time then went off on his way and let the drone be.
ReplyDeleteActually the tag will use less energy than the current gps models because the tag will only turn on if there is a change rather than just always being on. And I saw that video of the chimp taking down the drone, it was freaking epic.
DeleteI think that this is a really good way to deter poachers, but I see one problem: would the rhino be dead by the time the parker rangers came to investigate? You said that the park rangers were alerted when the heart beat of the rhino stops, so I don't know how long it would take the park rangers to get over there. It really saddens me that the poaching problem has become so great that conservationists and scientists have to go to such lengths to protect these rhinos. I am very interested to see this tag at work.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is a really good way to deter poachers, but I see one problem: would the rhino be dead by the time the parker rangers came to investigate? You said that the park rangers were alerted when the heart beat of the rhino stops, so I don't know how long it would take the park rangers to get over there. It really saddens me that the poaching problem has become so great that conservationists and scientists have to go to such lengths to protect these rhinos. I am very interested to see this tag at work.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that the electronic tag system can fix black rhino poaching problem. In my opinion, poaching are continuously happening because people manage to escape after poaching and I bet most poachers come back eventually to get the horn again. By using this technology, poachers will not be able to escape and these poachers should be punished very severely in order to prevent the extinction of the rhinos. Also the researcher should try to find out more about the black markets and how to close all of them. Poaching happens because there are people who are willing to pay big money for horns and black markets need to be controlled to end this illegal poaching.
ReplyDeleteI think it's good that the new tag system can help decrease poaching, and thus help the endangered species, like the black rhino. If only the alert can be triggered before the animal is killed so it still has a chance to be saved. It's terrible how some people can kill these amazing animals and that we have to resort to trying to tag every endangered species.
ReplyDelete