Animal Borne audiologger feels like it's a bit niche to be a full group.. Does anyone/everyone else agree it needs it's own space? Drop a comment below? 

Hi Stephanie!

It is a bit niche, I admit - but so is Footprint Identification Technique (FIT) 
I guess it would naturally fall under Biologging but that group is so big! 
How about introducing subgroups?

I do see audio logging as an interesting subset myself though. I vote for a group. I’ll join :-)

Thanks Lars for all of the info! At the moment we are thinking of picking up the audiologger with the collar, but thanks for the link. We'll definitely look into that as well. I guess the trouble might come if we drop it off too early, and there would still be battery left?

@StephODonnell I can't be the judge, but I would definitely join as well. When I mentioned our plan to another colleague of mine, she was immediately interested since she would like to have audio recorders on her tree hyraxes. 

@StephODonnell I would also be keen to join an audiologger group/subgroup, as I am working on the development of a long-term acoustic collar with @gwittemyer. It does seem a little niche, but on the other hand I'm (happily) surprised with the amount of interest it is generating.

Following up on this, we are working to make a highly adaptive animal borne acoustic collar. Still early days and working on field trial in the next 6 months. Happy to join the subgroup as well.

Sounds very interesting! Is this to be a collar in itself or a device to attach to a collar - (perhaps with a drop-off mechanism)?

Hi Kim,

I was just talking with a colleague about being able to have a look inside, so great that you've done it. This helps a lot, thanks! 

 

It is unfortunate that the "Laboratory 2" devices are not legally or morally available to those of us in countries and institutions with sanctions against Russia. I used Soroka 17e from them for my koala study (before the war).

They are nicely low powered and excellent for low frequency sound but they are vulnerable to humidity and you can't really pot them because they use a micro SD card for all communication/storage plus there is a physical button and the MEMS microphone to consider. Attached is a link to a photo of a moisture damaged S17e displaying my dodgy soldering. But you can read what most of the chips and components are. The microSD card (on the back of the board) uses most of the 1.6 mAmps so choosing the lowest drain card could really pay off or incorporating some other kind of memory and a dedicated data transfer interface. These chips could not be had for love or money during COVID but presumably they have gone back into production. This board was so small it had a smaller footprint than the end of a 26500 (C) cell.

 

Ok, great, thanks Simon! Good to know that you've already trialled it with lynx. I'll definitely be in touch! 

That is good to hear Simon! In the 2019 lion paper  the device uses a microSD card that has been potted with the rest of the board. Is that how you still do it? I'd love to hear more about your current device.

@StephODonnell  I would also vote for a mobile audio group. It is currently pretty niche but with the development of the right tech it could become part of so many tracking studies

The version of Simon's audiologger we deployed in 2022 on muskoxen looks very similar to the one depicted in his paper here:

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/21/8196

It has a µSD card clip holder. Simon provided a casing which could be sealed with a plate and silicone (against the collar). We did not have problems with water or moisture using these cases (only 2 out of 7 retrieved). The casings had room for one 17500 battery which gave us about 30 and 60 days of almost continous recordings at about 7807 Hz (quite a range in duration). 

The casing we used looks like this: 

Thanks Lars,

Looks like it is built to withstand an itchy Muskoxen. Weight and dimensions? I'm going to guess about 60 mm wide?

I am sure Simon can chime in with exact specifications. I do not have it with me now. The centre distance between the attachment holes at each in end is 20mm wich will fit the standard holes in a collar from Vectronics Aerospace. 



Simon posted images of the logger attached to a collar on a spotted Hyeana here: https://twitter.com/chamaillejammes/status/1441657479612542990

To-do now done in South Africa:

☑️ Being ridiculously proud of achieving data transfer over local GSM and LoRa networks for tracker

☑️ Being ridiculously proud of the way our wehear logger fits on lions and hyaenas. Looking forward to listening to their life. pic.twitter.com/CvgvovVjOp

— Simon Chamaillé (@chamaillejammes) September 25, 2021

Hi Jared,

Looks like you are developing some interesting products.

You are right that solar and satellite is making new things possible, particularly in terms of long deployments and greater logging frequency and quality. However, not all animals live in the daylight or in locations with good, reliable satellite coverage. Many nocturnal or heavy forest cover animals are also smaller, limiting some of the available tech we can use. So novel power systems still have a way to go in this field.

Are acoustic collars something that people want? Well I'm not sure that people realise it yet, but I think they will. Just as acoustic devices are great for spying on humans, they also offer a great way to spy on animals and establish their social interactions, feeding, heart-rate, breathing (thus metabolic-rate) and even their locomotion. (All we need is to train our study animals to remember to charge their hacked smart-phones). As automated systems to decode audio into behaviour improve, audio recording will become highly desirable. It has advantages over video in that it has less need to be aimed, works in the dark and can use less power and storage space.

We are studying muskoxen which are exposed to a polar night of between 3-4 month where the sun does not come over the horizon. On the other hand it also means that it will be continously OVER the horizon during the 3-4 summer months.

We are keeping an eye out for kinetic energy harvesting and there has been some interesting progress recently:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285930

@M_Stanton , you provide a nice list of uses of animal borne audio. We could add environmental sounds both abiotic and biotic.

We would LOVE to use audio more for ground truthing behavioural states and we would LOVE if the audio recordings could be GPS time synced...

@jared , it sounds interesting with the mentioned increased capabilities of the Iridium system. Can you link to any references for that?

Cheers, 

Lars

 

I heard it through industry chatter but can't find a news release on it yet.