BOTSWANA
Spotted hyena
With wildlife ecologist Rohan Wadhwa (University of Georgia), studying movement and human–wildlife conflict. Three weeks of continuous nocturnal acoustic data.
Why it matters
Research questions you can now answer
GPS tells you where an animal goes. CollarID tells you what it’s doing, hearing, and breathing — at full duty cycle, for the length of the deployment.
Was the hyena running or standing still when it vocalized?
Synchronized audio, motion, and GPS on the same animal — behavior comes from direct measurement, not from guessing it out of movement alone.
What rare calls are we missing with triggered recorders?
Continuous field audio captures the unusual events alongside the common ones — the training data triggered recorders can’t collect.
How does wildfire smoke change free-ranging animal behavior?
Particulate, gas, temperature, and humidity on the same timeline as movement and vocalization — exposure and its consequences in one file.
Acoustic recordings
No other wildlife collar hears the field
CollarID’s acoustic system — tuned with acoustic experts at MIT and in industry — records what existing platforms miss entirely. A few clips straight off the collar:
Spotted hyena
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Hyena running & vocalizing
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Cow bawling
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Cow mooing & birds chirping
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All-terrain vehicle
0:00
Plane overhead
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The full record
One animal, many signals
Every subsystem is captured on the same timeline, from the same collar — and any of them can be switched off, so the collar is tailored to each study’s questions and power budget.
Audio
Motion
GPS
Air quality
Humidity
Temperature
Light
The hardware
Engineered for the field
A conventional research collar in this category weighs 1–2 kg — most of it battery. CollarID Mk II runs 150 g, on solar, at fix rates several times finer than convention — and it’s built to take the abuse of the field: lion and hyena bites, and full water immersion.
150 g
Total weight, with multi-modal sensors and continuous bioacoustics — vs 1–2 kg typical for year-long collars.
Adaptive
A context-aware GPS fix rate that adjusts to live activity patterns — field-validated at a fixed 5-minute cadence on free-grazing cattle, several times finer than the ~4 h convention.
Lion-proof
Polycarbonate cover and machined aluminum base, validated with FEA against lion and hyena bite forces — and a gasket-sealed enclosure that survived repeated pressurized-water testing with no ingress.
In the field
Deployed on a variety of species around the world
On wild and domestic animals across several continents. Deployments are ongoing, with many more about to begin alongside researchers around the world — and every one returns real data that refines the platform.
A new lens on life
From an MIT Media Lab thesis to a field-proven platform
Designed by Patrick Chwalek, PhD, CollarID was developed at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with Kioxia, MIT researchers, and in consultation with National Geographic and the wider conservation community. The Mk II builds on thousands of hours of field data — an optimized architecture, lower assembly cost, and a larger solar panel for extended autonomous operation.
Deploy CollarID
Researcher, conservation organization, or funder — we’d like to hear from you. Mk II units are available for pilot deployments.
Request a pilot