Five years ago, French navy officer J\u00e9r\u00f4me Chardon was listening to a radio program about the extraordinary journey of the bar-tailed godwit, a bird that migrates 14,000 kilometers between New Zealand and Alaska. In his job as the coordinator of rescue operations across Southeast Asia and French Polynesia, Chardon understood better than most how treacherous the journey would be, as ferocious storms frequently disrupt Pacific island communities. Yet, somehow, bar-tailed godwits routinely pass through the area unscathed. Chardon wondered whether learning how godwits navigate could help coastal communities avoid disaster. Could tracking birds help save lives?<\/p>\n
This past January, a team from France\u2019s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), funded primarily by the French Ministry for the Armed Forces, began experiments designed to test Chardon\u2019s idea. Researchers with the new Kivi Kuaka project, led by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Jiguet, an ornithologist at NMNH, equipped 56 birds of five species with cutting-edge animal tracking technology. The French navy ferried the team to remote atolls and islands in French Polynesia, where the scientists attached tags using ICARUS tracking technology. These tags transmit the birds\u2019 locations to the International Space Station, which bounces the data back to scientists on Earth who can then follow the birds as they forage, migrate, and rest\u2014all the while waiting to see how the birds respond to natural disasters.<\/p>\n
The Kivi Kuaka project is focusing on birds\u2019 ability to hear infrasound, the low-frequency sound inaudible to humans \u00adthat the researchers believe is the most likely signal birds would use to sense storms and tsunamis. Infrasound has myriad sources, from lightning strikes and jet engines to the songlike vocalizations of rhinoceroses. Even the Earth itself generates a continuous infrasonic hum. Though rarely measured, it is known that tsunamis generate infrasound, too, and that these sound waves travel faster than the tsunami wave, offering a potential window to detect a tsunami before it hits.<\/p>\n
There is some evidence that birds dodge storms by listening to infrasound. In a 2014 study, scientists tracking golden-winged warblers in the central and southeastern United States recorded what\u2019s known as an evacuation migration when the birds flew up to 1,500 kilometers to evade an outbreak of tornadoes that killed 35 people and caused more than US $1-billion in damage. The birds fled at least 24 hours before any foul weather hit, leaving the scientists to deduce they had heard the storm system from more than 400 kilometers away.<\/p>\n
The idea that birds avoid tsunamis, on the other hand, is based primarily on anecdotal evidence from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, when survivors reported birds traveling inland in advance of the deadly wave. Jiguet says the idea makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because birds that survive tsunamis would be more successful at reproducing.<\/p>\n
If Kivi Kuaka\u2019s birds are able to perceive infrasound generated by Pacific storms or tsunamis, the scientists suspect the birds will move to avoid them. Tracking that behavior, and learning to identify tsunami-specific bird movements if they exist, may help the team develop an early warning system, Jiguet says.<\/p>\n
For the Kivi Kuaka team, tsunamis are the main interest; satellites and computer models already forecast hurricanes and typhoons accurately. But infrasound-producing storms are a useful test because they\u2019re more common than tsunamis. If their tagged birds evade them from afar, Jiguet says, it provides further evidence that they could serve as tsunami sentinels.<\/p>\n
The team plans on tagging hundreds more birds across the Pacific to prepare for a potential tsunami. \u201cI think if there is one wave that spreads across islands, yes, we should get data from different species at different locations to see if there are some convergent behaviors,\u201d says Jiguet. \u201cThat would definitely say it\u2019s worth continuing to tag and to develop local systems to better analyze this.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Ornithologist Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Jiguet says that even if the Kivi Kuaka project doesn\u2019t ultimately amount to a new way to forecast dangerous tsunamis, it will still yield valuable information about Pacific ecology. Photo courtesy of Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Jiguet\/MNHN-Kivi Kuaka<\/p><\/div>\n