It was a beautifully serene night in April when Roy Sasano, then a drone pilot with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, caught sight of the men in the boat. That is, his drone saw the men. Sasano’s vessel, the Farley Mowat, was a mile away.
He and his crewmates were patrolling a marine reserve in the northern reaches of the Gulf of California, trying to prevent poaching of a large fish called totoaba, and the incidental killing of a small, blunt-nosed porpoise called vaquita — little cow. Both animals are endangered and illegal to fish. But in China, the totoaba’s swim bladder is thought to have medicinal powers. It sells there for nearly $5,000 per pound. Poachers can’t resist. And while fishing for totoaba, they accidentally catch the porpoises as well. Perhaps 60 vaquita remain in existence.
Sasano was fresh from the Royal Canadian navy, where he specialized in IT, one reason Sea Shepherd brought him on. The moon was unusually bright on this April night, the sea calm and the air a comfortable 70 degrees. When he spotted the launch, he assumed it was the Mexican navy, which was also patrolling the reserve. So he approached aggressively, without the quiet-flying techniques that might prevent the drone’s detection. And when he saw that the men were putting a net in the water, it was too late. They heard the buzzing of the quadcopter, dropped what they were doing, and sped off.
Sasano cursed his own carelessness, and yelled for a colleague to alert the navy to pursue the poachers. That was out of his bailiwick now. To Sasano fell the task of gathering evidence to use against the poachers, which meant finding that net.
The Farley Mowat searches for nets by dragging a large submerged hook through the ocean. But after hours of searching, Sasano and his crewmates hadn’t found the net, which they assumed was drifting freely. Only when Sasano reviewed the footage from the drone did he see that the net was moored, not drifting. The Mowat returned to the coordinates where they’d first seen the launch. The crew heard a snap — the sound of the underwater hook snagging. A cheer erupted when a zodiac sent to retrieve the net confirmed that they had it.
“That was the greatest feeling,” Sasano told me recently, “their net in our hands.”
Sea Shepherd is what you might call a very pro-active conservation organization. (Detractors might call it overly zealous.) They’re perhaps best known for harrying Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. The International Whaling Commission banned whaling 30 years ago, but the Japanese still whale for what they claim are research purposes. Encounters with these whaling ships can veer toward violence. In the past, Sea Shepherd has tried to snarl the ships’ propellers with cables. They’ve lobbed stink bombs on deck. They, in turn, contend with water cannons and concussion grenades directed their way.
Peter Brown launches a drone from the Steve Irwin. Image Credit: Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.Think what you may of Sea Shepherd’s tactics, their motivation is one many of us share: preventing the continued erosion of biodiversity. As we face a period of mass extinction — of a potentially irreversible depletion of the web of life that sustains us — enterprising conservationists are exploring how new technology might curb those losses. In the near term, this involves eyes in the sky: drones. But in the long term, it may consist of something more comprehensive: semi-autonomous networks of sensors, some of them mobile and enhanced with artificial intelligence, that act as stewards of the wild.
Sea Shepherd got its first drone in 2011 — a fixed wing aircraft donated by a recycling plant in New Jersey. They planned to use the drone to film for their show on the Animal Planet channel, but it immediately became apparent how useful a remotely operated aircraft was in waging Sea Shepherd’s particular kind of war. It was easier and safer to use than the manned helicopter on board. It could fly in foggy weather without imperiling lives. Maybe most important, it allowed Sea Shepherd to more easily gather footage — evidence of what they say is illegal activity. Regulations prohibit a manned helicopter coming within 500 yards of a ship. But drones could hover right next to a boat and film. Ever since they got that first drone, except for one year, the Japanese whalers have succeeded in catching less than one-third of their quota, Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd’s founder, told me.
“It’s already proven to be quite revolutionary,” Watson told me. He’s since outfitted all the organization’s ships with drones. And he’s thinking about getting rid of his helicopters. “The only way to combat is to have the best technology we can deploy,” Watson said. “So far, this is the best.”
Welcome to wildlife conservation in the 21st century. Drones have changed warfare. They’ve transformed cinematography (and peeping tommery). If Amazon gets its way, they may soon disrupt package delivery. And now, the conservation community is abuzz with the potential of drones — of unmanned aircraft to fight poachers, monitor wildlife and help with basic biology research, like counting birds.
Drones have surveyed orangutan habitats in Borneo, watched over rhinos in South Africa, and herded elephants in Kenya — to keep them away from areas where they’re likely to get shot. Elephants don’t have much to fear in the wild, except, of course, poachers. But they loathe drones, whose whirring propellers mimic the sound of bees. And elephants happen to be terrified of bees. There’s even talk of arming drones with pellets of capsaicin, the hot stuff in chili peppers, to better herd animals.
To the degree that drones really can help save wildlife, they’re arriving none too soon — especially for the endangered species that are frequent targets of poaching. Poaching of wildlife has accelerated alarmingly in the past decade. During that time, the killing of rhinos increased fifty-fold, according to the World Wildlife Fund. By one estimate from a few years ago, three elephants are killed every hour in Africa.
Volunteers carry elephant tusks confiscated from poachers in Nairobi’s national park. Image Credit: Gettyimages.Earlier this year, Kenya torched several mounds of confiscated ivory worth about $172 million. The cache contained tusks from 8000 elephants and horns from 343 rhinos (which are worth their weight in gold: about $30,000 per pound). The entire illegal wildlife market is worth between $8 and $10 billion yearly, a value similar to human trafficking or the illicit drugs and arms trades. The World Wildlife Fund and other organizations warn that the trafficking networks involved in the illegal wildlife business, a weird amalgam of mafia and militia, have grown so large and gained such power that they threaten the stability of some nations.
But the problem begins, really, with the giant sucking sound coming from East Asia, particularly China, the world’s primary market for elephant ivory, rhino horns, shark fins and other rare wildlife products. The country’s newfound affluence, coupled with traditions that prize rare wildlife as food, medicine and status symbol, have ratcheted up global demand. China essentially functions as a voracious, many-tentacled beast that scours the globe for animals, the rarer the better, to jam into its cavernous maw.
That’s not to say western countries are exempt. The US is the #2 destination for African ivory. And compounding matters everywhere are habitat loss and fragmentation in an ever more crowded world, as well as poverty, corruption, lack of funding, inept governments, and climate change.
In truth, when you fully contemplate the poaching problem, it’s hard to imagine that unmanned flying machines — marvelous pieces of technology for sure — can really make much of a difference. And yet, some early results already seem quite promising.
One pilot project in a protected area in Kenya saw a 96 percent reduction in poaching after it began patrolling with drones. Ditto with a WWF-funded project in Nepal, although in the Nepalese case, the drones were part of a larger overhaul in how rangers conducted their business. These successes, plus various other projects in the works, raise the possibility of a major advance in conservation — a leap enabled by drones.
Image Credit: There’s something inherently pleasing about this idea: that one of our most fearsome inventions as a civilization — a small, nearly invisible aircraft that can, in theory, vaporize you from the sky — could be used not to blow people to smithereens, but to protect animals and trees and wildness. We’ve long nursed dark and probably well-founded fantasies about autonomous machines displacing and even enslaving us. But in actuality, here we are starting to deploy semi-autonomous technology to protect nature from people — to protect wildness from the insatiable, zombie-like appetites of modern, globalized civilization.
Which is another way of saying that drones may ultimately protect us from ourselves.
If you’re an orangutan mother in Borneo these days, you might not consciously notice the steady encroachment on your forest of farms and plantations, or the stands of forest that disappear from one week to the next, illegally logged. But you might be enticed by the gardens or plantations just beyond the forest’s edge, venture into them for easy pickins, and get, as one scientist told me, “a cap in your ass.” Now you’ve left an orphan orangutan baby behind.
Conservationists raise these orphans — nursing, diapering and nurturing them in sanctuaries. And when the apes are old enough, they’re released back into the wild. But a major hurdle to this effort is knowing how they fare after release. Orangutans are, uniquely among the great apes, semi-solitary, making them hard to monitor. And their forest is a soggy, peaty mess that’s difficult for humans, a bipedal ape, to traverse.
So one day over coffee in Switzerland, Serge Wich, a primatologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, and his colleague Lian Pin Koh brainstormed a solution. They imagined a fixed-wing drone that, using a pre-programmed autopilot, could do survey flights over orangutan habitat to monitor the forest and count orangutan nests.
Lian Pin Koh and Serge Wich. Image Credit: Within a year, they’d successfully tested a prototype. And in 2011, Wich and Koh launched a nonprofit to spread the technology they’d devised, called Conservation Drones. Wich consults all over the world now, and his vision is thrilling: a future in which swarms of semi-autonomous drones armed with infrared cameras constantly patrol parks, immediately alerting rangers of anomalies. Camera traps on the ground beam up information as drones pass overhead, meaning that the drones both gather data themselves, and relay it from other sources deeper in the jungle. Wich’s vision resembles the quantified self movement, but for nature.
Conservationists don’t have the budget for military-grade bandwidth or even, usually, top-of-the-line drones, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. So in reality these drones can’t always beam back information in real time, instead flying back with their footage stored onboard. If the drone captures a slaughter occurring, the rangers would not know about the slaughter until many hours later, once the drone has returned and they’ve reviewed its copious footage. As one expert told me, “You can have a drone flying for 100 hours. But if you can’t get a team there in five minutes, what’s the use of having a drone?”
Image Credit: The workaround, Wich thinks, is artificial intelligence — on-board software that helps the drones recognize what’s important — and enough processing power to run the software. That way, when the drone registers something notable, it can alert rangers about just that instance.
A Dutch company called Birds.ai is developing such software — a neural network that can learn to recognize cows, ships, rhinos and whatever else from high above. (The company’s commercial wing markets the software to farmers who might want to monitor livestock or crops from the sky. Its non-profit wing aims to supply the same software to conservationists for nearly nothing.) But a quality fixed-wing drone can still cost more than $20,000, says Charles Pezeshki, a professor of mechanical engineering at Washington State University in Pullman.
“These guys have no money,” he told me. “At the same time that they have no money, their needs are urgent.”
So a kind of DIY ethos had taken hold. Pezeshki and his workshop of eager students are trying to design a cheap drone for use in conservation. They want to use widely available component parts to create a kind of Franken-drone for less than $3000. So far, they’ve adopted a low-cost GPS autopilot from the DIY flight systems organization Pixhawk ($300), and a small computer from the DIY computer charity Raspberry Pi ($50). It’s the batteries that, at $1500, represent the greatest single cost.
The aircraft ships in December. “This drone kicks butt,” Pezeshki told me. He hopes his low-cost, easily repairable design will spread in conservation circles, fast. “The fact is that this is at some level really an endgame for elephants, rhinos, gorillas,” he said. ”We all just have to step up.”
But what would happen, I wondered, when poachers got their own drones? Or worse yet, used conservationists’ own tech to instead monitor rangers and locate more animals? With millions of dollars in the balance, surely poachers would adapt to anti-poaching measures, including drones.
Case in point: Remember that pilot program in Kenya where, after drones began patrolling, poaching fell by 96 percent? Officials declined to name where that effort took place because they worried that if poachers knew where drones were flying, they’d change their tactics — they’d adapt.
One answer, in the eyes of Thomas Snitch, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, is to be smarter about how the drones get deployed. His efforts in conservation take inspiration from work by colleagues who modeled where, along Baghdad’s roads, IEDs might be hidden. Even insurgents follow patterns, it turns out, which means predicting them is somewhat possible. Then you concentrate your defenses where modeling indicates attacks are most likely to occur.
Poachers, Snitch found, also follow patterns. They don’t like walking far, for example, so many kills occur near roads. And animals follow routines as well, the most important one being a daily visit to a water hole. So you focus your efforts where a road nears a water hole, and a village isn’t far.
In his current project in Southern Africa, Snitch has outfitted rangers with cheap GPS devices so they can register kill locations and animal activity, and then plot both with pins in a map back at the office. Visualizing what’s happening helps them focus anti-poaching efforts, he says. He also upped the pay of his rangers, and offers a $1000 reward to anyone who calls in a tip on large, big game rifles in the area. “You gotta build a citizen army,” he says. Since August, he’s confiscated eight big guns, and had 20 would-be poachers arrested.
Image Credit: Thomas SnitchHis rangers also take a breathalyzer test before and after their shifts, to discourage them from drinking on the job. (The inspiration? One day he accompanied the heavily armed rangers on patrol and noted that they were “loaded to the gills.” “There has got to be a better way to do this,” he remembers thinking as he eyed their guns. “I do not feel comfortable.”)
Snitch also wouldn’t reveal where in Africa his project is, for fear of “tipping off” criminal syndicates that might then adjust their tactics. “They watch the internet,” he says. But these commonsense efforts alone have reduced poaching by 95 percent, he told me. Over the past five years, the number of animals killed fell from about 50 in a six-month period to two. Snitch argues that drones only help as part of a larger, well thought-out anti-poaching effort. “The drones is the last 2 percent of the solution,” he told me.
So what about the most grandiose solution of all?
In his recent book Half Earth, the noted biologist E.O. Wilson argues that we should set aside half the planet as a nature preserve. Earth’s extinction rate is at least 1000 times what it would be without people around. He argues that we need to make space for the ongoing, natural processes that gave birth to us as a species, and which continue to sustain us. Wilson sees many current trends — including declining birth rates and ongoing urbanization — as facilitating this great withdrawal.
Modern technology is, in fact, key to the retreat. Ever greater efficiency and trends toward miniaturization could allow us to shrink our footprint — to make space on what’s become a crowded planet.
Wilson doesn’t foresee literally putting half the earth (like the entire western hemisphere) off limits, but rather ensuring that, perhaps linked together by wilderness corridors, half of the planet’s land area and sea can exist free from human interference.
And here’s where semi-autonomous eyes in the sky could contribute to Wilson’s vision. We may have to protect these areas from human incursion. But maybe as important, if we’re smart, we’ll learn from the wild half. We’ll continue to observe how nature and evolution solve problems. We’ll monitor it, ensuring its health and cataloguing its myriad forms.
So if human civilization increasingly represents a kind of cybernetic superorganism — a vast, living network of machines and people that’s greater than the sum of its parts — drones may function as sensory organs informing this brain, as probes for what’s really a nascent planetary nervous system. One could argue that this is what Wich, the folks at Sea Shepherd, and Snitch are all piloting, in their distinct ways and with their particular sets of technologies. They’re improving awareness of what happens in the wild.
If we actually pull off this great retreat, this new human-machine life form will have done something highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented in the history of life on earth. Rather than furiously expanding until all resources are depleted, it will have deliberately retreated as a survival tactic. It will have made room for other lifeforms. A new sort of intelligence, one that’s proactive rather than reactive, will have emerged.
We often imagine drones as invasive, as depriving us of our privacy. But in this idealized vision of the future, drones will be the sentinels watching over the wildness from which we all emerged.
