Have you ever heard about accelerometers? Maybe you do not know this term but almost everybody is using them nowadays. If you have a watch that is giving you the distance you walked, the calories consumed, etc. that means that the watch has an accelerometer included. Exactly as these watches can measure your movements and energy spent, similar devices can be used for animals to answer important questions.
The LFP team has been using accelerometers on lorises since 2014 when we first attached a simple accelerometer to collars.
Accelerometer is the white box attached to the collar near the blue battery part.
The accelerometer was simply giving the amount of activity every 2 minutes, and with that device, we studied, for example, the sleep patterns of lorises and we discovered that they go into torpor.
But many more things can be discovered using more advanced decisions that can give 25 points every second, and that we are now using to get more insights into hidden behaviours of lorises.
Little Shanti climbing down the bamboo trunk. Often we only see eyeshine when they are inside the bamboo area. Sometimes they are there, sometimes they disappear! Like looking for a needle in the haystack! (Photo credit: Wawan Tarniwan)
Answering Questions
For you who ever studied wild slow loris, you must ever experience observing them when they are inside a dense tree canopy or bamboo stands. They are difficult to see! That rise some questions, what do they do when they are hidden in bamboos? Are we underestimating their activity level? What influence their energy expenditure? Do bridges bring energetic benefits to lorises? These are some of the questions we want to answer. And to do that, we are going to calibrate the accelerometers so that we can match accelerometer data with behavioural data. We are also collaborating with Shaldon Zoo that kindly agreed to help.
More information can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/animals/special_issues/Accelerometers_Bio-Logging_in_Wild_Animals.
Expanding to Civet
Apart from these new accelerometers, we are planning to use more bio-loggers (a general term used to describe any device collecting data automatically on important biological parameters) such as GPS collars for civets. There are so many applications of bio-loggers that we decided to launch a special issue on the journal Animals. In brief, “We welcome original papers regarding all aspects of research using bio-logging devices, including but not limited to new analytical techniques, behavioural validation, physiology, energy expenditure, sleep, movement ecology, and community ecology.”
Stay tuned and ready to discover our new papers and research using bio-loggers!
About the writer: Dr Marco Campera. Coffee and wildlife, are two words to describe Dr Marco briefly. Dr Marco is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford Brookes University, you can find more information about him here.
