The study of wild terrestrial mammals has been greatly advanced in recent years by the wide spread adoption of GPS technology into biologging collars. These devices provide investigators with hour-by-hour information about animal location that can be used to understand a wide variety of patterns ranging from animal migration to habitat preferences. Current biologging technologies provide little information, however, about animal behavior and physiology which are critical to understanding how terrestrial mammals respond to different stimuli such as climate, interactions with other organisms, and landscape influences such as human development. Recent breakthroughs in sensor miniaturization and power consumption now make it possible to incorporate low cost accelerometers and magnetometers, such as those found in consumer applications like the iphone and Nintendo Wii, into a biologging collar that continuously measures behavior and energetics. The project will develop, calibrate and test a collar (the ANIMA) that can be used to assess continuous time-energy budgets, movement patterns, behavioral diaries, and daily energetic costs of free-ranging terrestrial mammals such as mountain lion, wolves and elephants: i. Collar development: Design and build a long life collar for terrestrial wildlife with archival storage of continuously sampled accelerometer and magnetometer data for precise reconstruction of energetics, behavior and dead reckoning of animal movement path, onboard control of GPS sampling interval based on animal foot fall frequency, and remote download of GPS locations with behavioral codes. ii. Collar calibration to behaviors such as walking, running and feeding for a variety of species to determine energetic costs using metabolic chambers and/or empirically derived energetic models. iii. Collar testing on wild mountain lions in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in order to test functionality and durability. The development of the ANIMA leverages the skills of a unique interdisciplinary team from the departments of Computer Engineering, Environmental Studies, and Ecology and Evolutionary biology. Successful completion of the project will result in a major technological advancement for the scientific study, monitoring and management of a wide range of mammals living in diverse terrestrial ecosystems. The ANIMA collars are designed for and will be made available to the biological community at large, potentially leading to significant breakthroughs in large mammal ecology, conservation and management. In addition, as these collars are designed for megafauna that are naturally charismatic, insights are likely to greatly inform public knowledge and opinion of large mammal behavior and conservation. Outreach activities include presentations at professional conferences, public lectures, curricula development for elementary and high school science classes, an interactive web site and coverage by various media. Details on where and how to purchase ANIMA collars will be made available on our website at http://people.ucsc.edu/~cwilmers/index.html.
