The Internet of Animals - Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth

The researchers had turned their jalopies into labs on wheels: They sliced holes in the cars’ roofs, through which they inserted pole-mounted antennas. “We drove like tornado chasers behind a single bird each night,” Wikelski writes, “constantly rotating our antennas to determine where the bird was going and to receive the strongest signal possible. All we needed to do was speed after the thrushes while recording their sounds continuously.”

This gonzo research effort yielded breakthrough insights into how birds communicate: A bird would fly up to a certain altitude, call out, and listen for other birds’ responses. If the replies came, the bird would know it had found a good, safe pathway. The research, Wikelski writes, revealed “a highway in the sky, where birds were providing each other with key information on how high to fly, where to go, and who to follow.” This “ancient organic symphony,” he writes, is “created by animals as they exchange information across species and continents.” And it is high time, he argues, for humans to “tune in.”

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Why is building an internet of animals so important that Wikelski has devoted decades of his career to it? The route we are on, particularly in the West, of viewing the natural world only in terms of what we can extract from it for our own gain, is a path to ruin. Wikelski believes the “next chapter in human evolution” is the Interspecies Age, where humans recognize that we are partners with other species, consider their needs when we make decisions, and “link the knowledge these other species have to our own knowledge.” Among many other benefits of this Interspecies Age, he says, will be the ability to draw on animals’ sixth sense to help us predict “when something big is happening in the environment” — a buildup of toxins in a landscape, the onset of an El Niño event, the emergence of a plague of locusts.

All these are important. My one gripe about “The Internet of Animals,” though, is that it places too much emphasis on what animals can tell us about things that might harm us — like predicting earthquakes — as opposed to what they can reveal about how our actions might be harming them. Perhaps this is simply a tool to convince a broad audience of the project’s potential. But the true value of an internet of animals goes back to the meadowlarks. If we don’t know what routes they follow, where they land along the way, what pitfalls — natural or human-made — may cause their journeys to end in tragedy, then we can’t work effectively protect the habitat, food, and other resources they need to survive. An internet of animals would help us see the currently invisible parts of our world — how animals distribute seeds, how they cope with the impacts of climate change, how they interact with one another when there isn’t anyone around to watch.

- Review of the new book The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth by Martin Wikelski