LX Group | tial part of the effort to protect them. Previously, the relevant authorities had been spending a lot of money sending people out on a daily basis to run an intervention program to find out why koalas were dying so they could take preventative measures. The existing systems, however, could only provide simple data. They could track where the koalas physically were, but not verymuch beyond that. “The client came to us and said ‘Listen, we need a prototype in a really short period of time. We need to work together to solve this problem.’ And we did, and we had a lot of fun throughout the process.” The product of Project Caramello Koala is the K-Tracker – the only animal tracker in the world designed especially for koalas. The strangulation-resistant design is proven in the field to have “excellence animal welfare outcomes.” At 220 to 250 grams, the KTracker is well within the 3 to 5 per cent of body weight recommended for tracking devices, and its epoxy enclosure offers “unparalleled durability.” From a technical standpoint, the KTracker also provides high accuracy near-tolive tracking and more comprehensive data than what is available with any other existing system. The product features “dual sensor activity logging with motion profile analysis capabilities, orientation analysis, high-G and free fall detection as well as automatic low activity email report generation” – so trackers receive suspected mortality alerts immediately. “One of the main problems with running an intervention program is you need to know what’s killing the koalas,” Simon says. “It sounds morbid, but to do that you need fresh carcasses. When something goes wrong, you need to get the body quickly to find out what killed it – was it a disease, was it a dog attack, was it something else?” “The problem with a lot of the existing solutions was that they would tell you where the koala is, but not necessarily whether it was alive or dead,” he continues. “We developed a system that gives you a lot more information at your fingertips.”
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