Can you snap me now? It's a turtle-to-turtle wireless network

by Kaitlin | July 5, 2007 at 02:37 pm | 1023 views | 1 comment

Two teams of researchers with seemingly divergent areas of interest have come together for a techie-meets-nature experiment in Massachusetts. The researchers are simultaneously studying new wireless technology and tracking the movements and activities of snapping turtles in the area. The coolest part, in my books, is that the tagged turtles exchange info whenever they pass within 100 metres of one another. I hope it's something along the lines of "OMG, i just ate so many bugs, LOL!"

The turtle-to-turtle relay ends when one of the snappers passes near a single base station that receives all the accumulated information. While Jones thinks the snappers may roam up to 16 kilometres from the Deerfield swamp they know as home, he says it's in their nature to return to the bog where the base station is.

Working like a cellphone sending a text message, the base station zaps the data to the UMass-Amherst campus about 20 kilometres away, where biologists are charting each turtle's whereabouts.

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jordan

at 14:52 on July 5th, 2007

good stuff:

It's called IRC: Itinerant Reptilian Chat... no, not really. I just made that up.

But seriously, such a thing would be useful as an antitheft tool for your car. Or, if the signal is widely readable across a certain radius, a sort of speed-dating on wheels, so people can have a Lavalife-like profile that can be scoped out by nearby co-subscribed commuters.

Or we could just use it to track more turtles, which is fine by me, since I like turtles.