The fighting raging on Ukrainian soil has collateral effects on the world of research: the Russian-European ExoMars mission, which was to carry a rover to the Red Planet, officially suspended, is a major example. But a host of collaborations are also more or less affected. Biologists from the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) and the French Office for Biodiversity in Paris were caught up in geopolitical reality during an expedition to the other side of the world, to French Polynesia. .
On February 24, the Russian military offensive against Ukraine begins. That same day, researchers Romain Lorrillière, Benoît Fontaine and Romain Provost flew to Moorea, in French Polynesia. This is the first stage of a two-and-a-half-week mission as part of the research project called “Kivi Kuaka”. Objective: to study the behavioral changes of certain species of birds as natural disasters approach. Biologists must capture wild birds to equip them with small beacons capable of recording and transmitting their position for several months or even years. Valuable data for establishing behavioral models and, perhaps, one day, developing new early warning systems for natural disasters.
“We really like these moments on the pitch, says Benoît Fontaine, research engineer and conservation biologist at the MNHN. We leave our computers to come into contact with the species we study, oftent in remote places, where we abstract ourselves from everyday life. » But not this time. Because the researchers carry in their luggage light beacons called “Icarus”, and heavier OrniTrack beacons. Problem: the Icarus beacons, provided by the Max-Planck Institute in Konstanz, Germany, transmit their data via an antenna attached to… the Russian module of the International Space Station. It is therefore the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, which collects the data before transmitting it to the German institute.
Interrupt transmission
Biologists on mission are confident: “Russian-Western collaborations in the space field have gone through all the troubles of the last decades”, recalls Benoît Fontaine. So they get to work. In Moorea and Tetiaroa, they capture birds that they equip with Icarus beacons. And they follow the news, from a distance. “We lived the beginning of the war day by day, like everyone else”says Romain Lorrillière, postdoctoral researcher at the MNHN.
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