Sensors

Playing with my children on a beach on Hatteras Island, a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina, I struck up a conversation with a man walking his dog. We were standing next to a turtle nest, which the National Park Service had roped off with a sign stating that the spot was federally protected. “Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly when the baby sea turtles will come out?” I mused. He smiled and said “Well, we’re working on that.” That conversation generated a partnership to develop TurtleSense, a novel, inexpensive way to monitor turtle nest activity remotely. In a newly published study, we describe how it works. Participants included Eric Kaplan, the man I met on the beach and the founder of the Hatteras Island Ocean Center; David Hermeyer and Samuel Wantman, retired engineers at the San Francisco nonprofit Nerds Without Borders; IBM master inventor Thomas Zimmerman; and veterinary student Joshua Chamberlin. As a developmental n...