Okambara, a flat 169 sq km (66 sq miles) reserve, has become the "perfect site to test the system," says Sierra Jane Mattingly, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. Here, 5% of all large animals have been fitted with GPS tags that continually monitor their location. But the real goal is to help wildlife in the most precarious places worldwide.
The lessons learned here are helping in the battle with poachers in national parks in South Africa – home to the world's largest rhino population – and aims to safeguard the free-roaming wildlife populations in currently unmonitored places like the Congo Basin.
The project is the realisation of a long-held dream of Martin Wikelski, the ornithologist on hand in Okambara. Wikelski, a world-leading movement ecologist who heads the Max Planck Institute, hopes to tag 100,000 animals across the planet by 2030, with the goal of understanding the signals hidden in animal behaviour. As they beam out their movements to receiver towers or
satellites, animals can collectively act as "sentinels" to protect rare giants like rhinos, he explains.
Patterns of panic
Over three days in mid-2024, the intruders in Okambara make around 30 of these salvoes – all captured through the lens of an unmanned drone that hovers overhead. From this sky view, the rapid dispersal plays out, again and again, with animals tracing out signature patterns of panic and withdrawal.
The team of hunters fires dozens of rounds and the game scatters, except for the giraffes, which usually remain impassive and calmly look on from their raised vantage point. Yet by the week's end, not a single victim has fallen to the hunter's gun. That's because, unlike the poachers who have killed hundreds of rhinos in southern Africa, this hunting party is not here for slaughter. Instead, today's team are scientists doing their best to simulate the arrival of a deadly threat.
The armed interlopers – an ornithologist, an expert game hunter, and two wildlife researchers – are part of an experiment to develop a real-time tracking system that could save the lives of Africa's most trafficked animals. By recording the distinctive patterns traced by different species as they react to a hunter, the team ultimately aims to train an algorithm that can send out a warning alarm to rangers.
These warning systems are still in development at nature reserves – but the recent launch of a wildlife tracking satellite, dubbed the "Internet of Animals", aims to link up a truly global system of real-time alerts.