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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Been bothered for a long time that wildlife conservationists are so quick to tag animals with labels and trackers left and right. Is it really helping, or is it rather control freakery and actionism when the natural habitat or food chain or whatever is simply shrinking and there's not much that can be done about it save for full-on stopping obvious causes? Can not at least animal identities and movement be tracked or estimated with minimal-invasive methods or cameras more intelligently?

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It helps establish where the habitat/range of the animal actually is. For animals that move around a lot that can be difficult. For example a group of bats may fly down a particular corridor to get to a feeding site. You can establish the habitat for particular animals and improve understanding for the species as a whole to improve prediction.

This understanding is all useful in adjusting human activity to reduce impact. Or at least understanding what that impact may be.

Most of the time, tags don't seem to cause much problems but sometimes there can be some effects [1].

Conservation efforts can be effective if evidence is needed in order to fight against further land destruction (such as property development), especially when migratory birds use small but important areas for stopovers.

On the other hand, a lot of conservation research is merely clarifying somewhat obvious problems, but the current capitalistic system is very inefficient when it comes to dealing with these problems: in it, you must hit people over the head with the obvious, because people are more attached to money than preserving our ecosystems. If we were smart, we could do more with much less research.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3802820

You can't solve what you can't measure.

Again, a false dichotomy. The state of many animals is already well known enough, and the problems they face is well known enough. The debate isn't whether to measure or not, but how much measurement occurs and how it reflects the poor state of how conservation works -- which is not the fault of conservationists of course.

The implicit argument you are making is that something has to be measurable to be worth saving. The most important things in the world you cant measure.

There is some research near me using tags on bats to see if their cross sea migration is affected by wind farms. Cameras clearly wont work.

TIL bats migrate. https://www.batcon.org/flight-of-the-night/

How do you prove or disprove that airports mess with migration patterns?

Wind farms?

Loss of forests?

Loss of wetlands?

Making the world friendly to animals means providing areas where they can feed, reproduce, be safe, drink uncontaminated water, migrate safely, etc. There are costs to accommodating them and nobody is going to want to pay without knowing what positive impact will result.

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