Ep 43: Project ICARUS

What can we learn from animals by constantly tracking their movements with transmitters? How can we use information from collectives of animals to study and predict disease spread, earthquakes, and outbreaks of pests? How do you transform a massive, international scientific idea into a reality?

On this episode of Big Biology, we talk with Martin Wikelski, the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior. Martin leads Project ICARUS, an international collaboration aiming to track thousands of tagged animals at once from space. We talked with him about the long road to getting the project off the ground and what will ultimately learn from this new and powerful tool.

Photo: © MPIAB Jacob Stierle