Rethinking terrestrial wildlife telemetry through instrumentation without capture and handling

Richard Bischof 

Telemetry using animal‑borne biologgers is central to wildlife research. Capturing and instrumenting wild animals, however, remains the most invasive, logistically challenging, and costly component of telemetry studies. This has contributed to current practice, which favors long tracking durations on few individuals, prioritizing longevity over temporal detail. While this model has yielded important insights, it also imposes ethical and scientific constraints. I argue that less invasive deployment methods could enable a complementary, lighter‑touch telemetry framework. Autonomous marking approaches — first developed in the mid‑1900s but now largely ignored — offer such a pathway by eliminating physical capture, restraint, and chemical immobilization. After revisiting early work on autonomous instrumentation,I present two proof‑of‑concept demonstrations of autonomous GPS‑collaring, one in an ungulate and one in a carnivore. I discuss how such approaches could support shorter deployments, improved population coverage, and finer temporal resolution. Crucially, by reducing or eliminating capture‑related disturbance, autonomous instrumentation could lessen cumulative welfare impacts and observer effects, thereby strengthening the ethical foundation and scientific validity of wildlife telemetry.