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Life

Smarter tags for the animal underworld

By Paul Marks

25 October 2006

If conservationsist want to know what a wild animal is up to, they fit it with a radio tracker. That’s fine if it stays out in the open – but not if it’s a burrowing or diving kind of beast.

The GPS radio tags currently used to track wild animals and monitor their behaviour don’t work if the creature goes underground, underwater or into a cave, because the tag then loses the satellite signals that allow it to calculate its position and cannot transmit its data back to base either. What is more, the hardware is often quite heavy, forcing a…

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