An active-radio-frequency-identification system capable of identifying co-locations and social-structure: validation with a wild free-ranging animal

Behavioural events that are important for understanding sociobiology and movement ecology are often rare, transient and localised, but can occur at spatially distant sites e.g. territorial incursions and co-locating individuals. Existing animal tracking technologies, capable of detecting such events, are limited by one or more of: battery life; data resolution; location accuracy; data security; ability to co-locate individuals both spatially and temporally. Technology that at least partly resolves these limitations would be advantageous. European badgers (Meles meles L.), present a challenging test-bed, with extra-group paternity (apparent from genotyping) contradicting established views on rigid group territoriality with little social-group mixing.

In a proof of concept study we assess the utility of a fully automated active-radio-frequency-identification (aRFID) system combining badger-borne aRFID-tags with static, wirelessly-networked, aRFID-detector base-stations to record badger...