A little bit of history
The evolution of Behayve 2004-2020
Behayve’s precursor, WhaleTrack, was developed in 2004 by Bill Fulton of Living Ocean for Microsoft’s new Pocket PC, a forerunner of today’s cellphones. Using Bluetooth GPS it allowed non-invasive tracking of whales based on compass bearing and range to the whales, with automatic import into a geographic information system (ArcGIS).
At that time, Bill and colleague Sam Barripp began an annual survey of migrating humpback whales off Sydney that continues to this day, recording their tracks in a 5.3m runabout and recording water temperature and depth twice a minute via a feed from ship’s instruments. While satellite tracking of whales over long distances was well established, the intent here was to investigate factors influencing the tracks of a large number of whales in a limited geographic area.
In 2007, Bill and Sam delivered a half-day workshop on WhaleTrack at the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s biennial conference, held that year in Cape Town, South Africa. Things were going quite well until a participant embarrassingly asked whether the software was configurable. Well, no.
With the release of the iPhone it was clear that the right thing was to build a completely new app for that device, totally configurable and able to support research on a wide range of animals, terrestrial as well as marine. The new app would need to integrate tracking, behavior and environmental conditions and provide real-time feedback on events as they happen. It would need to support well-established techniques for recording behavior. Martin and Bateson’s classic book Measuring Behavior provided an excellent standard there. In 2015, an early prototype of Behayve was born.
Comfortingly, it had turned out to be possible to incorporate many parts of WhaleTrack’s codes into the new app. WhaleTrack was like the brain stem of Behayve, technology taking a cue from biology.
In mid 2015, Living Ocean switched its humpback recording from WhaleTrack to Behayve. Many features were still lacking, but every year we learned from experience, the app was improved, and features were added. The app proved highly reliable, and we have never lost any data whatsoever.
Finally Behayve was ready to be shared with the research community and citizen science collaborators. We are announcing availability with a poster presentation at the World Marine Mammal Conference in Barcelona, Spain, on 9 December 2019.
A large amount of data was gathered 2004-2019, resulting in Living Ocean being invited to participate as a full partner in a study by Griffith University (Australia) and several South Africa Universities, to model the effects of climate change on southern hemisphere whales.
With climate change accelerating, the study of animal behavior takes on even greater importance than before. We hope that Behayve can play a part with animals of air, land and sea.