Week Four: In which things go wrong...but also right

Yellow-Green-Yellow comes down Big Tree.

By mid-day on 5 February, we had deployed eight working tags on iguanas. A ninth tag, #3 wasn't charging correctly and had to be placed in a lower power mode.

On 10 February, tag #5 on White-White-Brown (WWBr) went Missing-in-Action, along with the lizard. We hope she is off on a great adventure and eventually returns. Her tag send no signal which may mean it is dead, or simply out of range.

White-Orange-Green, the famous WOG of this blog, decided there was little reason to come out and bask for almost a week. We watched with trepidation as her battery voltage drop. Luckily, WOG decided it was time to reappear -- and her battery is charging fine.

Every day we get up before dawn and download logs from the base stations. The logs are the physical proximity encounters between animals, all to understand their social structure. Base stations also record "pings" from tags so we know when and generally how far tag #5 was from any base station when it and WWBr went missing. Each base is managing to successfully "talk" to tags, receive log downloads, and cover a good physical area.

PBKR

 Of course after bringing tag #3 to a good charging level, and spending two days trapping an animal that interacts with the tagged group, Pale Blue-Black-Red (PBKR), our twice daily voltage checks revealed the tag was again not keeping a charge. So, back into a low power mode.

To help understand the data logs, we are processing a number of days by hand. 8 days and ~7 tags is roughly 25,000 lines of tag-to-tag pairs, by day, time, and radio signal strength. It does tell a story!