Animal lifestyle affects acceptable mass limits for attached tags
- Journal:
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B
- Published:
- DOI:
- 10.1098/rspb.2021.2005
- Affiliations:
- 11
- Authors:
- 21
Research Highlight
Minimizing the impact of tags used to track wildlife
© Westend61/Getty Images
Tags attached to track wild animals provide a wealth of valuable data on animal behaviour to aid conservation, but it’s crucial that they aren’t so heavy that they interfere with the animal’s lifestyle. Researchers in the UK have now devised an improved method to determine the ideal weight of tags.
A commonly used rule of thumb is that tags shouldn’t exceed 3% of an animal’s mass, but this fails to account for the force generated by the tag when an animal accelerates.
Now, a team led by researchers from Queen’s University Belfast has applied a rule that the force generated by a tag during animal acceleration shouldn’t exceed the 3% of the animal’s weight for 95% of the time.
For relatively sedentary animals such as the koala this was value was 2.98% of the animal’s mass — very close to the 3% of the original rule — whereas for rapid movers such as, weasel-like carnivores called martens it was much lower at 1.6%.
References
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288, 20212005 (2021). doi: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2005