Advanced modern technology approaches like Kingsley’s are needed to help make progress on long-established wildlife challenges. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF’s) Living Planet Report 2018, the size of global wildlife populations declined by an astonishing 60% in the last 40 years.

In response, the federal government has passed renowned legislation like the Endangered Species Protection Act. Of the many species covered by the act, desert tortoises have received the second most funding for conservation, but efforts to avert their predation have yielded few results.

The chief enemies to the tortoise in the Mojave Desert are not humans, but human-subsidized predators, particularly coyotes and ravens. These animal species—often overpopulated due to human influences like the production of edible trash—use visual and olfactory cues to locate and prey on tortoises. Culling the predator species is not a desirable option, for many reasons; for example, the common ravens (Corvus corax) that prey on tortoises are federally protected species themselves under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

The BERNARD prototype may look just like a tortoise; but it reacts like an intelligent, fearsome animal, delivering a barrage of light, sound, and non-lethal electric shock tuned to the predator attacking it. When a predator attacks a decoy, onboard motion sensors detect whether the decoy is lifted or flipped, indicating whether the predator is more likely to be a coyote or raven, which tend to lift versus flip tortoises, respectively. This discrimination allows the delivery of stimuli customized to deter a specific predator species. The decoys can be mass produced and spread throughout an environment like the Mojave Desert to affect an entire population of predators.