Bulky Tracking Collars

July 30, 2020

Question: I recently saw video of a young mountain lion that was captured in the Bay Area. It was released back into the wild with a tracking collar of some kind. I think it’s great that biologists are studying lions and other wildlife, but do the collars have to be so big and bulky? I can’t imagine that poor cat can get around in the wild easily with that thing around its neck. (Amy)

Answer: The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has been putting radio collars on animals for decades now, and we’ve gathered a lot of data and knowledge about how animals react to these devices. Though they may look bulky at first glance, the collars are specially designed to do their job without disrupting the animal’s life.

Collars are made from foam and leather with a circuit board housed in strong metal or plastic. We make sure collars weigh less than five percent of the animal’s body weight. The collar placed on the 68-pound lion captured in the Bay Area weighed just one pound, which is less than one-and-a-half percent of its weight. All collars feature a remote control or timed release mechanism and are typically programmed to fall off before the battery’s charge runs out. For example, if a collar has a battery life of two years, it will likely be programmed to fall off at 22 months. For young animals that haven’t reached full size, we use expandable collars that will stretch as the animal grows.

We know from monitoring collared lions that they are able to reproduce, kill prey, maintain a healthy weight and live full lives. A 10-year-old female collared lion that we’re monitoring recently had her fifth litter of kittens! Collars are important because they allow for real-time tracking when researchers are on the ground and produce stationary data points when monitoring remotely. We are currently monitoring about  80 collared lions in California, and those collars produce valuable data that we use for conservation efforts.