Nautilus

Where the Wild Things Go

Elephants

When I sat down with Iain Douglas-Hamilton at his home in Nairobi to learn how he went from deploying the first radio collars on elephants in 1968 to deploying the first GPS collars on them in 1995, he told me about an elephant named Parsitau. “We put a prototype on him and it lasted for all of 10 days, and we thought this was absolutely the cat’s whiskers.”

Recording four locations per day, those 40 GPS points were the first ever recorded on an animal in Africa. “It was so incredible,” Douglas-Hamilton recalled. “Here was a collar that would go across international borders, work by day, by night, inside forest, outside forest, up

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus3 min read
Making Light of Gravity
1 Gravity is fun! The word gravity, derived by Newton from the Latin gravitas, conveys both weight and deadly seriousness. But gravity can be the opposite of that. As I researched my book during the sleep-deprived days of the pandemic, flashbacks to
Nautilus9 min read
The Marine Biologist Who Dove Right In
It’s 1969, in the middle of the Gulf of California. Above is a blazing hot sky; below, the blue sea stretches for miles in all directions, interrupted only by the presence of an oceanographic research ship. Aboard it a man walks to the railing, studi
Nautilus8 min read
10 Brilliant Insights from Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machi

Related Books & Audiobooks