Here’s a question for AA readers from Nancy Bunbury, from the Seychelles Island Foundation, who is conducting some exciting work on large gecko interactions, ecological roles, and niche separation in the palm forests of the Seychelles:
“The main species in question is Ailuronyx trachygaster (first field study on this amazing species) and one thing we would love to do is look at movements and territory size (also because we suspect it’s the main pollinator for the coco de mer which has huge conservation and inevitably commercial value). We are looking into GPS tags for the geckos (which are about 150g in weight) but it seems the technology for such a small tag requiring GPS and remote downloading is not yet available. Do you happen to know if such tags have yet been developed and who I might be able to contact for them (I’ve tried the standard larger companies for animal tracking devices)?”
Any suggestions?
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Liam Revell
Was looking into this recently, and I found that ‘Telemetry Solutions’ has a 2g GPS data logger collar (http://www.telemetrysolutions.com/track-wildlife/gps-for-lizards.php). It features remote data download, which I understand to mean that you just need to get close to the animal with an antenna to get your data.
Daniel Scantlebury
I’m more interested in how you’ll secure a transmitter to an animal that sheds its skin to escape predators like Ailuronyx.
Vicky Zhuang
There were some researchers in the Zurich Zoo that had luck with transmitters (.9g) and Phelsuma, which are pretty sensitive too (Furrer et al. 2006). It looks like they did fall off sometimes but not so much it interfered with the work.
Shashank
try holohill (http://www.holohil.com/). For frogs, bats and snakes- http://www.holohil.com/transmitters.htm#bat