CBC The Nature Of Things (2018.11.04) Spying on Animals

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Camera technology is revolutionizing the study of animals. With more eyes in the wild than ever, we can finally bear direct witness to many of nature’s longest kept secrets. For scientists, this is an incredible development. Much like the invention of the microscope for microbiologists, suddenly, we have a whole new way to see. The bounty of new imagery is also a profound new opportunity to bond with wild animals emotionally.

In Spying on Animals, remote cameras in an Indian jungle catch rare images of tigers, helping scientists count an entire population and even track each endangered tiger’s movements through their habitat. In the remote Arctic, drones quietly follow a hard-to-study bowhead whale population and answer a 170-year-old mystery about their behaviour.

Sometimes, the animals take the pictures themselves! Ultra-light, collar-cameras worn by woodland caribou provide POVs we’ve never seen before, as well as critical information about their diet and the amount of space they need to survive. Motion detection cameras record the first-ever images of a baby giant armadillo in Brazil who became a social media star, and in South Africa, they’re being used to photograph, and potentially manage an entire ecosystem with the cooperation of thousands of citizen scientists who help catalogue the pictures online.

Spying on Animals shows us how innovations in remote, unmanned cameras let us bear witness to animal behaviour 24/7, almost anywhere on Earth. This is a revolution for scientists, a new and powerful connection between ourselves and wildlife, and an inspirational force for conservation.