Today I learned that bats are a leading factor in technology detection

Bats are elusive little creatures, making them the perfect subject for scientists to try out new animal detection systems. This is especially good news for me, because I like both bats and to see images of animals with dull little trackers on them. How can you look at these stamps with ridiculous antenna hats and not at least laugh a little?

One of the latest innovations in the tracking of portable materials is the dulog system, a wireless sensor network built by biologist Simon Ripperger and engineer Niklas Duda, which has been tested in several bat detection studies over the past few years. Now that the dulog has proven to be small with bats, which are small, nocturnal and generally difficult to observe, the pair believe that it can be useful to monitor all types of animals.

“If your project can succeed with bats, it can probably work with most species,” Ripperger said in a recent Silicon Labs blog post. When he first started the bat visit, he saw that his adviser was ‘actually running behind bats and chasing them with an antenna’. I will keep the image in my mind for a while longer, but Ripperger and Duda think that the small sensors of the dulog animal studies will facilitate – less chasing necessary.

Image: dulog

The data collected with dulog labels can be downloaded remotely, which means that scientists do not have to wrestle animals after the initial attachment to get data from their labels. It is also smaller and lighter than current GPS tracking systems that allow remote downloading. The bat will fit in the palm of your hand and the sensor weighs less than a gram. The most exciting thing for Ripperger is that the labels ‘talk to each other’, which means they can be used to track the social behavior of tagged animals based on their closeness to each other over time.

So far, the dulog system has been used in studies that have yielded some pleasurable findings: mother bats guide their young from sleep to sleep, bats previously held captive their social relationships when released into the wild, and bats displayed a social distance- behavior when they are sick. After these successful bats, Ripperger and Duda hope to sell the system to researchers soon for use with other, large and small animals.

In terms of the possible applications for the system, ‘the air is the limit’, says Ripperger. I am not involved in any important animal research, but personally I would like to attach a label to my dog ​​to keep an eye on her common mischief. I think they will also be helpful in keeping track of which squirrels are the biggest offenders to eat my bird seed. For now, it is not directly available, so I will leave the science to the scientists and continue to enjoy photos of animals with backpacks and hats.