The tiny transmitter tracking monarch butterflies' migration, Canada to Mexico

begiant.ca

41 points·upofadown··8 comments

> The transmitter lets out a signal every second on 2.4 gigahertz, which is in the frequency range of Bluetooth receivers. Any smartphone or tablet within 100 meters of a BlūMorpho will acknowledge the signal and pass it on to the Project Monarch server, whether it has the app downloaded on it or not, provided Location Services and Bluetooth are turned on.

Is this accurate? If so, I am really curious how this works. Are they effectively sticking Airtags on butterflies?

Download the app and appears to be working, the paths plotted on the map on the west coast make sense.

Yeah but they state the following:

The transmitter lets out a signal every second on 2.4 gigahertz, which is in the frequency range of Bluetooth receivers. Any smartphone or tablet within 100 meters of a BlūMorpho will acknowledge the signal and pass it on to the Project Monarch server, whether it has the app downloaded on it or not, provided Location Services and Bluetooth are turned on.

Project Monarch - Discussion (77 points, 2 weeks ago, 26 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50262982

Super cool. $175 and it's on 2.4GHz.

https://celltracktech.com/collections/digital-radio-products...

Very curious on the battery life on this thing....

This subject was on here a while back, but this is the first article with truly engaging photos of the transmitter and the process of application up-close. This is super cool! I was/am surprised no one has talked about the espionage implications of something like this. You really can put a track on anything.

Truly impressive technology. I would have been very confident it was impossible to put an RF tracker on a butterfly.

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