Rethinking terrestrial wildlife telemetry through instrumentation without capture and handling

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Telemetry using animal‑borne biologgers is central to wildlife research. Capturing and instrumenting wild animals, however, remains the most invasive, logistically challenging, and costly component of telemetry studies. This has contributed to current practice, which favors long tracking durations on few individuals, prioritizing longevity over temporal detail. While this model has yielded important insights, it also imposes ethical and scientific constraints. I argue that less invasive deployment methods could enable a complementary, lighter‑touch telemetry framework. Autonomous marking approaches — first developed in the mid‑1900s but now largely ignored — offer such a pathway by eliminating physical capture, restraint, and chemical immobilization. After revisiting early work on autonomous instrumentation,I present two proof‑of‑concept demonstrations of autonomous GPS‑collaring, one in an ungulate and one in a carnivore. I discuss how such approaches could support shorter deployments, improved population coverage, and finer temporal resolution. Crucially, by reducing or eliminating capture‑related disturbance, autonomous instrumentation could lessen cumulative welfare impacts and observer effects, thereby strengthening the ethical foundation and scientific validity of wildlife telemetry. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2SX02 Life Sciences Animal welfare, 3Rs, biologging, capture and handling, immobilization, observer effect, individual heterogeneity Published: 2026-04-21 16:14 Last Updated: 2026-04-21 16:14 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: The author declares that a patent application has been filed related to the autonomous marking technology shown in the Supplementary video. The technology is currently part of a publicly funded qualification project (Research Council of Norway, NFR360030) aimed at exploring commercialization opportunities. These interests did not influence the study design, data collection, analysis, or interpretation. The author declares that no other commercial or financial relationships exist that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Data and Code Availability Statement: No empirical data were analyzed in this article. Examples of empirical evidence are provided in the Supplementary Information Videos S1 and S2. Language: English