1,000 English Ants to Receive Radio Tags

About 1,000 northern hairy wood ants are expected to have tiny radio tags, about 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) long, attached to their bodies, allowing researchers to track their movements on a protected English estate.

The wood ants, which get their name from the "eyebrows" visible through a microscope, live in colonies housed within nests connected by trails worn into the ground by years of ant traffic. The biologist doing the work, Samuel Ellis of the University of York, intends to examine how the ants interact with one another.

The results are expected to help staff at the Longshaw Estate in Derbyshire manage the estate — a natural and archaeological site —with the ants' needs in mind.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/22801-english-ants-transmitters-tracking.html

Tags to shed light on northern hairy ants' movements

Researchers are planning to fit tiny tags to a protected species of ant in order to gain an insight into the insects' behaviour.

A team from the University of York will fit the devices to 1,000 northern hairy ants - the UK's largest ant species.

Although ants have been tagged in laboratories before, the project will be the first to attempt to track the movement of the creatures in the wild.

The project will take place on the National Trust's Longshaw Estate.

The site in Derbyshire is home to more than 1,000 nests and and estimate 50 million worker hairy ants.

Multiple nests

Sam Ellis, from the University of York, said the study would help answer questions about how the colony of ants organise themselves.

Read on:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19359555

Indonesia's 'unique' whale sharks get pet tags

The "unique habit" of whale sharks that converge to feed fromfishing nets in Indonesia has allowed them to be tagged with low-cost technology usually used on pets, conservationists said Tuesday.

Experts in June injected tiny pill-sized radio transmitters beneath the skin of 30 whale sharks in Cenderawasih Bay in the eastern province of Papua, conservation group WWF said.

And it was only made possible because the giant animals, which measure up to 45 feet (13.7 metres) but are harmless to humans, were gathered to feed on fish caught in fishermen's nets, WWF Indonesia project leader Beny Ahadian Noor told AFP.

A YouTube video by Conservation International (CI) showing a whale shark sucking fish from a hole in a net in clear blue waters has now attracted more than one million views (www.youtube.com/watch?v=71FLO_6JJVo).

"Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags have been used on pets such as dogs, but this is the first time on whale sharks," Noor said.

Researchers would usually use a more sophisticated satellite method, at $4,000 a tag. But Noor said each radio-frequency tag used in Cenderawasih Bay cost only $4.

"It's good enough for a start since we have little information about the behaviour of whale sharks here," he said.

Marine biologist Mark Erdmann, who joined the expedition, said it was "fairly impractical to swim after the giants with a receiver wand under water".

"What makes this tagging possible in Cenderawasih Bay is the unique habit this population has of aggregating at... fishing platforms to feast upon the small silverside baitfish that the fishers are catching," he said.

Whale sharks, the world's largest fish, are classified as "vulnerable" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN.)

http://news.yahoo.com/indonesias-unique-whale-sharks-pet-tags-103323726.html?_esi=1