DEVELOPING ACOUSTIC TELEMETRY SYSTEMS FOR TERRESTRIAL MAMMALS: A BRIEF PROGRAM HISTORY

摘要

This paper summarizes a 20+ year saga in which a technologically naive wildlife biologist pursues a seemingly modest technological objective. Namely, an electronic system for remotely monitoring the behavior of individual free-ranging mammals from the audible sounds they produce. After all, mammals and other vertebrates do generate a variety of sounds that are diagnostic of specific activities. And in an age of advanced electronic applications in biology, suitable technology should have been readily available. In fact, acoustic technology did exist for sounds generated by other vertebrates, notably birds and marine mammals. Why then a saga, and not a smooth success story in the case of terrestrial mammals? First, for this biologist, the effort obviously demanded a stout bridge across the biology - engineering divide; specifically, the collaboration of electronic engineers that might find the subject compelling. Secondly, an "ideal" comprehensive wildlife acoustic telemetry system would comprise an amalgam of four sub-systems: (a) a compact microphone transmitter that could be unobtrusively mounted on subject animals, (b) a field-worthy acoustic data receiving and recording system, (c) a catalogue of behaviorally diagnostic sounds for the species of interest, and (d) a capability for machine classification of behaviors based on sound signal properties. Third, because no suitable commercial systems were available, they had to be created specifically for this undertaking. Finally, both the interest in and funding available for terrestrial mammal acoustical telemetry were limited, especially in contrast to the resources available for marine mammal programs.