Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (13 page)

In the idyllic decades after the end of World War II, Americans discovered nature. In the 1950s and ’60s, families eager to see a slice of wildness flocked to places such as Yellowstone National Park. By then, the park’s gray wolves had already disappeared, but there were other fearsome predators for visitors to see. Grizzly bears were a particular draw—so much so that the park’s management installed bleachers at several garbage dumps so tourists could sit and watch the bears paw through food scraps and other trash. As park attendance rose, so did the number of human-bear interactions; the bears crashed through campgrounds looking for food and even outright begged for it at the side of the road. Unfortunately, these encounters didn’t always end happily—for members of either species. The bears destroyed property and injured visitors, and rangers killed animals with a history of problem behavior.

Enter John and Frank Craighead, biologists and twin brothers who thought that learning more about the bears’ lives could help Yellowstone’s management reduce these interspecies conflicts. So the men decided to harness recent advances in radio and transistor technology to conduct some grizzly surveillance. Beginning in 1961, the Craigheads trapped bears at Yellowstone, tranquilized them, and then outfitted them with collars containing radio transmitters. (In case you’re wondering: To trap a bear, try bacon, pineapple juice, or, of course, honey.) The stunned bears then continued on their way, but by using a radio receiver to tune into the signals issuing forth from the grizzlies’ thick necks, the Craigheads were able to follow the bears as they ambled through the wilderness. As Frank Craighead recounted in his book:

Beep, beep, beep, full of portent and meaning, the repetitive metallic pulse came in loud and clear on the crisp fall air. The sound had nothing of wildness about it. No deep primitive instinct of the chase stirred in us at the sound, nor did it evoke a feeling of oneness with nature. Yet this beeping coming to us in the vastness of Hayden Valley thrilled us as few sounds ever had. The vibrant pulsing signal, though new to the Yellowstone wilderness, told us that we were in communication with the grizzly we identified as bear Number 40, just as surely as the distant honking told us that the Canada geese were on the wing. But the beep was more specific than the honk of the goose or the guttural caw of the raven, for it emanated from one particular grizzly bear somewhere within the three thousand square miles of the park.

The technology opened up a whole new way of interacting with the wild world, and the Craigheads’ project—one of the first large-scale uses of radio collars—signaled the birth of the modern era of wildlife tracking.
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Radio transmitters weren’t much use to the era’s marine biologists, in part because radio waves don’t travel well through salt water. But these scientists didn’t want to be left out of the tracking revolution that the Craigheads and others were launching on land, and during the 1960s and ’70s, they started developing their own instruments. The first attempts were slapdash; one scientist measured the diving behavior of a Weddell seal with a pressure gauge and a wind-up kitchen timer. But biologists and engineers stuck with it, eventually creating devices that recorded information about marine mammals’ dives over the course of days and months. They also started following fish using acoustic tags, which emitted sound waves that could be detected by underwater microphones mounted to boats. The sound waves, alas, didn’t travel very far, so scientists had to trail fish closely in order to stay in range.

Over the following decades, advances in computing made wildlife tags smaller and more powerful. The development of satellite technology presented exciting new options; tags that communicate with satellites allow biologists to sit comfortably in their labs while zeroing in on a distant animal’s exact location on the globe. We now have a burgeoning supply of sophisticated electronic tags, some smaller than a jelly bean, that can keep tabs on wild animals for months or years at a time. These devices are proving to be especially valuable for learning about life in the ocean; marine biologists can’t go sit in the middle of the sea and watch the fish stream by the same way that Jane Goodall peered through the thick forests of Tanzania to study her beloved chimps. By bolting a tracking device to a shark’s fin or implanting one in a tuna’s belly, we landlubbers are gaining intimate access to the lives of ocean animals.

And not a moment too soon, considering that our oceans are in crisis. Heavy fishing, pollution, and climate change are all making life difficult for the species that dwell in the sea. Populations of marine animals—fish, mammals, reptiles, and birds—have declined by an average of 89 percent from their historical highs. The latest generation of electronic tags are a powerful weapon in the battle to keep wildlife healthy and thriving, particularly for the marine biologists whose subjects are so slippery.

Between 2000 and 2009, for instance, a team of California scientists used a slew of electronic tags to follow the movements of 1,791 marine animals from 23 different species. The venture, known as the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) project, helped researchers discover new migration pathways and marine hot spots—Goldilocks-like “just right” regions of the ocean where many species converge.
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“When we start to understand how animals use the environment,” says Randy Kochevar, a marine biologist at Stanford University who was one of the principal investigators of the TOPP program, “it puts us in a much better position to make informed decisions about how to manage and protect those populations.”

TOPP was a hugely ambitious demonstration of the potential of marine tagging, but it was also a mere jumping-off point. TOPP has morphed from a local endeavor into an international one (called Global Tagging of Pelagic Predators, or GTOPP), and scientists are constantly dreaming up new tracking projects. As the latest generation of tagged animals go about their daily lives, the computers fastened to their bodies are doing more than simply recording their movements—they’re also collecting data about the ocean and its changing conditions. In this way, electronic tags are shifting animals’ roles from passive research subjects to active creature collaborators—and, perhaps, partners in saving their own watery worlds.

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For us two-legged, land-walking, air-breathing brutes, it’s all too easy to overlook ocean life. I know I have. In all my years chowing down on spicy tuna rolls, I had never—not once—stopped to consider the animal on my plate. But standing in the Tuna Research and Conservation Center (TRCC) in Monterey, California, it’s all I can think about. The center, jointly operated by Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, is essentially a big warehouse, and most of the floor space is taken up by three large round tanks. Resembling enormous kiddie pools, they are filled with 150,000 gallons of seawater and dozens of bluefin tuna.

It’s no wonder I’ve got Japanese food on my mind. Bluefin have a bright pink flesh that is highly coveted for sushi and sashimi, and the fish can fetch staggering sums. (In 2012, a 593-pound specimen sold for $736,000 at a Tokyo fish market—more than $1,200 a pound.) This is the first time I’ve seen living bluefin, and they are magnificent animals, beefy and muscular, and yet, somehow, lithe. Silver and glistening, they look like enormous bullets. They thrash their tails back and forth with such energy that their tanks quake, and choppy waves travel across the water’s surface.

These big bruisers are just babies, two and three years old; bluefin can live for thirty years and grow to be thirteen feet long and 2,000 pounds. They are strong and fast, able to reach speeds of 45 miles per hour and traverse entire oceans in a matter of weeks. (Tuna have huge geographic ranges, spending time everywhere from South America to Norway). Their fins retract, giving them exceedingly streamlined bodies, and they are warm-blooded, which makes them oddities in the fish world but keeps them toasty as they cruise through icy waters.

Bluefin tuna swim so fast, far, and deep that it has been difficult to learn about their lives in the wild. Marine biologists use satellite transmitters to track sharks, seals, and turtles, which spend time near the ocean surface, but tuna live beyond the reach of satellites.
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So scientists had to develop an alternative solution. In the 1990s, they realized that they could take advantage of the fact that tuna are commercially harvested and outfit the fish with tags that store location information for later, rather than transmitting it in real time. The idea was that when a fisherman landed a tuna equipped with one of these “archival tags,” he could remove the device and return it to researchers. The fisherman would get a financial reward for his service, and the biologists would get weeks, months, or years of detailed data that would enable them to reconstruct the tuna’s path.

Barbara Block, a Stanford marine biologist who directs the TRCC, helped pioneer the archival tagging of tuna, and she has used hundreds of the devices to follow the migrations of fish in the Atlantic and Pacific. To deploy the tags, Block and her team head out to sea, where they often brave stormy weather as they fish for tuna that can outweigh them by hundreds of pounds. Once they’ve wrestled one of these giants into the boat, they lay it on the deck, cover its eyes with a wet towel, and use a hose to irrigate its gills with seawater. One team member makes a three-to-four-centimeter incision in the tuna’s side and places an archival tag inside the abdominal cavity. The tag is a marvel of miniature engineering. It crams a multitude of electronics into a small stainless-steel cylinder approximately the size of a tube of lipstick. It contains a suite of environmental sensors, a microprocessor, a tiny battery
,
and enough memory to store years’ worth of data.
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The whole thing weighs in at one-tenth of a pound and can operate more than a mile below the ocean’s surface, at temperatures below freezing. Tucked inside the tuna’s belly, the tag will measure the fish’s depth and internal body temperature as it swims.

When the researchers sew the fish back up, they leave the tag’s “stalk,” a long, thin tube attached to the metal cylinder, jutting outside the tuna’s body. This stalk contains sensors that will measure the water temperature and level of ambient light as the fish steams across the ocean. The scientists also attach a brightly colored “streamer tag” to the outside of the fish, which will alert fishermen that there’s a bounty on the electronic device hidden inside. The lucky fishermen who end up with these tuna in their boats can remove the implants, contact the scientists, and return the tags for payouts of as much as $1,000 per fish. (“Big $$$ reward,” as the streamer tag says.) All this poking, prodding, and tagging takes less than three minutes. The team then pushes the fish out of the boat’s “tuna door,” sending it gliding down a wet blue tarp, Slip ’n Slide–style, into the ocean.

It could be weeks, months, or years before the fish is caught and the tag makes its way to Block and her colleagues. Once they have the device in hand, the scientists download all the data it’s been collecting. They use a combination of readings, including those from light, water temperature, and time sensors, to calculate the fish’s latitude and longitude on a given day. By stringing these locations together over the course of many days, they make highly detailed maps of each tuna’s aquatic wanderings. Block constructs these tuna trails for a variety of projects and programs. Since the mid-1990s, she has been tracking Atlantic tuna under the auspices of a research-and-conservation program known as Tag-A-Giant. For a decade, she tracked Pacific tuna for TOPP, and she now heads its successor, GTOPP. But all roads lead back to the TRCC, where Block and her colleagues study tuna biology, test out new tagging technology, and refine the techniques they use in the wild.

As I tour the facility, I run into Alex Norton, the facility’s scruffy blond, visor-clad tuna manager. He holds his elbow out to me expectantly. Since the staff here often have wet, fishy hands, he says, the mode of greeting consists of elbow bumps. I angle my funny bone toward Norton and officially make his acquaintance.

Norton tells me that I’ve arrived just in time for a tuna feeding, and he enlists me to help. I don some gloves and climb up a ladder to a plank suspended just below the ceiling. I crouch and shimmy down the plank until I’m squatting directly over a tank of tuna. Norton follows behind. We start doling out the multicourse meal, dropping the offerings into the pool below us. First up, an
amuse-bouche
of vitamins, then a main course of squid and, for dessert, a tuna favorite: a bucket of fatty, oily sardines. It is a true feeding frenzy, the tuna zooming to the surface to snatch up the proffered delectables.

I ask Norton how a self-described “surfer dude” who waxes poetic about the beauty of the musculature of a tuna in motion feels about implanting electronics inside such impressive marine specimens. He says he doesn’t think the instruments themselves physically harm the fish, but he has imagined what the psychological experience of being tagged must be like for a tuna. “You think of it as this alien-abduction scenario,” he says. “You’re swimming along and you eat something that looks wonderful. All of a sudden you’re dragged toward this big giant thing—you know, it would be like a tractor beam, pulling you in—and then you go onto the mother ship, where they probe you, insert something, and chuck you back!”

It doesn’t sound like a pleasurable experience, and tagging and tracking have long attracted controversy. In the 1960s, for instance, wilderness activists raised philosophical objections to the Craigheads’ bear-tracking project. To these critics, radio collars represented an unwelcome human intrusion into the natural world. Other activists of the era were more concerned about animal welfare, worrying that big, bulky transmitters would cause discomfort, irritation, and pain.

Although tracking devices have evolved considerably since the 1960s, scientists still grapple with the effects of their instruments. Making even a small change to the body of a wild creature can have a big impact on survival and reproduction. In some studies, for example, penguins wearing time-depth recorders or radio transmitters took longer to find food and had higher rates of chick mortality. Researchers speculate that the devices interfered with the birds’ streamlined silhouettes, increasing drag while they were swimming, and thus the amount of energy they had to expend. In certain species of fish, tagging has been associated with slower swimming speeds and growth rates, as well as muscle damage and scale loss at the site of attachment.