Scots will connect seals to the internet

Your face when you're being watched

Biologists from the University of St. Andrews who study seals will use the help of their mobile service provider Vodafone to create an M2M network of tags that will be attached to marine mammals. The network will help to study more deeply the processes occurring in the population of these animals - in particular, to answer the question about the reasons for the decrease in their number in the last 15 years.

The university’s marine mammal division will conduct its experiment on the Orkney Islands, 16 km from the northern tip of Scotland. 20 of the 70 islands of the archipelago are inhabited. Together with the two tiny remote islands of Sul-Skerri and Stack-Skerry, located 60 km to the west, and not included in the Orkney archipelago, the Orkney Islands make up the area of ​​Scotland in Orkney.

Telemetric tags, fixed on the skins of animals, will actually connect them to the “Internet of things” (IoT), and will send researchers data on their movements, habits and environmental conditions. For this, the M2M network from Vodafone will be used - a machine-to-machine network, one of the specializations of the provider.
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Tags, of course, will not cause inconvenience to the seals - they will be attached to the fur on the neck, and will gradually fall off during the process of molting. They will allow researchers to obtain data with previously inaccessible detail.

In some traditional habitats of seals in the vicinity of Scotland, the number of individuals since 2000 has decreased by 90%. With the help of this study, scientists will try to obtain data that will subsequently help to understand the causes of this process and try to stop it, or even reverse it.

The study was commissioned by the government and the National Heritage Foundation of Scotland.

Machine-to-machine communication is a technology that allows machines to exchange information with each other. A vivid example is ATMs that bilaterally exchange information with banking servers. In Europe, the largest operators are Telefonica in Spain, Telenor (Scandinavia), Orange Business Services (part of France Telecom) and Vodafone.