By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Columnist

The study of zoology often involves spending a lot of time sitting and watching — watching birds in the trees, watching the behavior of fishes on coral reefs, watching the activities of whales at or near the surface.

The method has obvious limitations. The main one is that the observer can't follow the subject everywhere — can't fly as high as the birds, can't dive as deep or swim as far as the fish and whales.

Increasingly, technology is making life easier on scientists and providing them with access they've never had.

George Balazs, a turtle researcher with the National Marine Fisheries Service, was recently able to put a satellite transmitter on the back of a green sea turtle, and followed the deep-sea route it took from Big Island feeding grounds to nesting beaches in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

A satellite transmitter showed that Laysan albatrosses sometimes fly thousands of miles to load up on fish to feed their young — as far from Hawai'i as San Francisco Bay and the Aleutian Islands.

The latest wrinkle in animal observation is "crittercams." The cameras are fitted onto wild creatures so scientists learn not only where they go, but what they're looking at.

Off Kona, biologist Robin Baird of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and local whale expert Dan McSweeney of the Wild Whale Research Foundation have been following a pod of short-finned pilot whales with crittercams attached with suction cups.

Crittercams also have been strapped to the backs of Hawaiian monk seals, as researchers try to solve the troubling failure of the animal's population to recover after significant declines during the past several decades.

"Use of crittercam technology has given us the unique ability to identify foraging habitat and prey resources essential for Hawaiian monk seal survival," said Bud Antonelis, chief of the Protected Species Division of NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Honolulu.

The technology still isn't useful everywhere. Many birds, particularly small Hawaiian forest birds, are too little for the cameras now available.

"The general rule is that the device should be less than 3 percent of a bird's body weight," said Eric VanderWerf, Hawaiian bird recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

If you have an issue, question or concern about the Hawaiian environment, drop a note to Jan TenBruggencate, The Advertiser's Kaua'i Bureau chief and its science and environment writer. Reach him at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com, (808) 245-3074 or P.O. Box 524, Lihu'e, HI 96766.