(dramatic music)
They've shared the planet with us
for thousands of years.
And yet, there's still a lot we don't know about them.
We had animals that are somehow picking up earthquakes
and volcanoes that we don't know how they're doing it.
Where and why do they constantly move?
We want to learn more about the animals
because we know that they can tell us much more
than we ever expected in the past.
How do their movements affect us?
Animal movement can help humans
predict changes to the earth.
In particular natural disaster.
This is a major change in our relationship with animals.
Who knows what else animals are sensitive to?
A breakthrough project promises
to redefine our connection
to earth's wild creatures from space.
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music)
Off the coast of Indonesia, an undersea earthquake
causes a towering wave that flattens the town of Banda Aceh.
It's all gone, all gone, nothing left.
160,000 people perish
along with countless animals.
(dramatic music)
An hour before the tsunami hits,
elephants become restless and start trumpeting.
Their owners can't calm them down.
Their cries are a warning.
If you talk to the elephant owners
in Banda Aceh, they have survived.
Elephants break free of their chains
and lead locals and tourists to higher ground.
There is reason to hope that these kinds of disasters
could potentially be anticipated.
(dramatic music)
The launch of a new global project
called ICARUS is helping researchers
better understand animal behaviors.
ICARUS stands for the International Cooperation
for Animal Research Using Space.
It's the brainchild of one man with a vision.
ICARUS is a system that allows us
to have very small electronic devices,
little cell phones in principle that record
what an animal is doing and sends it to a satellite
in this case, the space station to us on the ground.
The idea came together in a rain forest.
(bright music)
Martin Wikelski and I were working at Panama together
on a project where we were tracking animals
with older technology.
So we built all these towers that went above the rainforest,
and we discovered that the higher we got our antennas,
the better range we got.
And Martin was like, "We really need to get our antenna
"up in outer space."
This led to the German and Russian
space agencies collaborating on a space antenna
that receives and transmits data.
Main technical challenge was to design a system,
which is able to receive very thin signals
from various small transmitters from very far away.
The space station or the space-based receiver
that is the most transformative aspect about ICARUS.
That really scales it up to nearly the whole globe.
(rocket engine roaring)
The Russian rocket launches a transport module
containing the antenna into space.
Once in orbit the module docks
with the international space station.
(speaking in foreign language)
Two cosmonauts install the antenna
on the Russian segment of the station.
(speaking in foreign language)
It's a very substantially sized antenna
and it was actually a very difficult
it's one of the longer spacewalks that ever conducted.
The spacewalk lasts
over seven and a half hours.
All right, 2511.
All right this is Mikhail I'm on.
(speaking in foreign language)
The computer sends it down almost like an email
gets sent down from the space station.
The second part of the ICARUS system
is a small electronic tag attached to an animal or bird.
A solar panel, a circuit board and the battery,
and this will be stripped on animals like a backpack
or in a little leg band on the back of a fish
or as an ear tag.
The tags record an animal's GPS coordinates
and data about the environment.
Other sensors collect information
about the animal's health and stress level.
(speaking in foreign language)
The tags data is then sent up to the space antenna
and onboard computer.
This ICARUS tags are really smart.
Right before the space station gets overhead, they turn on,
they send the data up to the space station
and then they turn off again.
So that really saves on battery power.
We can put a tiny little recording device
on a young animal and learn
what it knows about the environment.
All its relationships with other animals
and where it has been in the environment.
Understanding animal movements
can help us predict changes on earth,
such as natural disasters or disease outbreaks.
We can see not just how a few animals are doing,
but how whole populations of animals are doing,
and also how they're interacting between different species.
Animals possess a different kind
of intelligence than humans.
It's more sensory based.
Animals have evolved for millions,
hundreds of millions of years.
Their senses are tuned to the environment,
they have better hardware.
Their noses are better, their ears are better,
their electric organs are better.
The brains of animals are superior
to any of the computers that we have.
(upbeat music)
To find subjects to track,
researchers travel to several continents.
Africa in particular has huge populations
of diverse species.
We've got zebra and impala hanging out together here.
These two species in particular will mix together
effectively giving them a larger group size
to keep an eye out for predators.
(bright music)
The first step to study an animal is you need to catch it
and give it the tracking tag.
And sometimes that's the hardest part.
It's amazing how good some of these animals are
at avoiding humans.
A bamboon isn't gonna let you just this nicely
take it out of the cage and give it a tag
it's gonna bite you and try to hurt you.
You have to anesthetize them to about 30 minutes
to do your work.
Just enough time to attach a tag collar,
get a weight, and take blood and sweat samples.
By the time the animal starts waking up,
you can kind of put it back in the cage,
once it's fully awake, you can let it go and run off.
(gentle music)
Catching and tagging birds
calls for a different strategy.
We've got to fake egrets.
These egrets hopefully will fly overhead
and they'll see a bunch of white birds in a lake,
they'll come down, they'll see our fish in the bins,
they'll walk over, and they'll step on one of our traps.
More than 40,000 bird species
constantly migrate across the planet.
(speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic music)
Researchers were surprised
by how far some birds will migrate.
There's a wader that was tagged and out in the Pacific
and no time before has a wader of that size been tagged
and then followed over a long distance.
We were able to follow this wader from South America
all the way up to Texas, that migration was astonishing
and the speed in which it happened.
Environmental changes
are altering bird migration routes.
Some species no longer return to their usual habitats.
They are reacting to now a rapid ongoing change
of conditions worldwide.
Heat waves or cold snaps because of human encroachment.
Deforestation or other habitat impacts.
Some scientists believe,
animals possess a sixth sense about natural disturbances
like volcanic eruptions or earthquakes.
(people screaming)
People around the world who are telling these stories
about animals anticipating major disasters.
Some studies suggested that animals can predict
things like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption
before humans can.
We think that the sixth sense of animals,
the sense of something is in the air,
it's not just one animal,
but it's the collective, interaction of all these animals
that know something about the environment,
and they amplify each other's nervousness.
(bright music)
This special sense was put to the test
right after a devastating earthquake struck central Italy.
(siren wailing)
We came immediately afterwards
to study what the aftershocks are doing to animals,
or if they can anticipate the aftershocks.
But then we were extremely lucky
because there was a two day period
when there were no earthquakes, no after shocks,
and then there was a massive additional earthquake over 6.6.
ICARUS tags were attached to farm animals,
living near the quakes epicenter.
What these tags are measuring
is basically every movement in any direction.
The tags continuously recorded
the animals activities for two weeks.
So, if the animals here are becoming more active
or more nervous before an earthquake,
then this is something that these tags can detect.
We honestly don't know what they're sensing,
how they know that something bad is about to happen.
(air whooshing)
The physiological process behind this
is not fully understood, but new theories are emerging.
One hypothesis is that they can actually see it.
See changes in the magnetic field with their vision.
Just recently, scientists discovered
a magnetic sensor in the retinas of migratory birds.
Humans don't have it,
I think other primates don't have it,
animals that move long distances
are the ones that seem to have it.
The sensor may be a specific protein
that reacts to earth's magnetic fields.
(bright music)
Animals can also warn us about diseases
before they escalate into a pandemic.
Zoonotic diseases ultimately require a transmission
right between animals and humans.
Or somebody has their villages like right on the forest edge
and animals come in and use some of the same places
that humans use and that's when
some of these transmissions might happen.
When a disease connected to one species appears
scientists must track down the initial carriers.
Okay, where is that species?
Where might be transmission hotspots?
How could we change our behavior
to minimize future transmissions?
You can start to identify animals that might be sick,
but also how the animals might be moving diseases around.
It's not just one or two species
that might be vectors of diseases,
but there are many species out there.
(bright music)
ICARUS is deepening the symbiotic relationship
we have with animals.
Something we've ignored for too long.
We can learn from wild animals again.
And we want to bring that back to people
so that everybody can feel the fascination
of knowing about an elephant
and what they're doing, what they're facing,
about their troubles.
From this idea say of a hundred thousand sentinels
of a hundred thousand tagged individuals across the globe
simultaneously roaming around,
we're able to get an aggregate signal
that can tell us about new things
that we haven't even thought about asking yet.
The sky's the limit for future ICARUS projects.
We're getting new discoveries with every day
that ICARUS has been switched on.
Already we're seeing completely new things
that we were just technically not able to see before.
(motor humming)
Until now, people could not monitor
these animals 24/7 so continuously,
and now with the technology we have, it's super easy.
(rocket engine roaring)
The ICARUS system will be continuously updated.
The things that I'm really excited about in the future
are smaller tags you know getting down
to three grams to two grams,
and hopefully finally, to one gram,
which will allow us to track a whole bunch
of new species of birds and bats and even insects.
We're working on a ear tag that we can use
for larger mammals that'll be a almost
like a small earring.
There's real interest now at NASA
in particular the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
which is behind the Mars Rover
to bring some of that GPS tracking technology
in one of the future space missions.
By understanding animal behaviors
and movements better,
we will be able to help them as they help us.
As human population increases,
as problems arise with climate change,
we want to help them to protect the animals better,
but we also want to learn more about the animals
because we know that they can tell us
much more than we ever expected in the past.
So we need a global connectivity of knowledge of animals,
and that's what ICARUS provides.
for me personally, this is a dream come true.
(dramatic music)