Comment by 1659447091
16 hours ago
>> To better understand the stresses on these migratory species, scientists at Lighthouse Field are testing a new ultralight radio tag. Weighing less than a tenth of a gram, these tags, when placed on butterflies, can passively ping Bluetooth- and location-enabled cellphones of anyone nearby.
They put a solar powered tracking tag on a butterfly...
Then made an app and gamified it to get people to use their phones to collect, track, and upload the processed monarch migration data. It's like Pokemon Go meets SETI@Home for butterflies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8ZyJn6BENc
https://swmonarchs.org/ProjectMonarch.php
https://celltracktech.com/pages/project-monarch-press-releas...
A related project, but for birds - https://motus.org
Motus is a distrbuted network of ground stations for tracking birds and other species (like bats!) for research - they also use CTT tags for tracking (along with tags from another company called Lotek - https://www.lotek.com)
Motus is also used for bats and insects! The butterfly project the parent linked to is using Motus: “ This year, new receivers have been added to Motus towers around the Southwest as well as special nodes to pick up their signals.”