Below is a press release about the Methods paper ‘An active-radio-frequency-identification system capable of identifying co-locations and social-structure: Validation with a wild free-ranging animal‘ taken from the University of Oxford.

© Peter Trimming

Detecting the movements and interactions of elusive, nocturnal wildlife is a perpetual challenge for wildlife biologists. But, with security tracking technology, more commonly used to protect museum artwork, new Oxford University research has revealed fresh insights into the social behaviour of badgers, with implications for disease transmission.

Previous studies have assumed that badgers are territorial and, at times, anti-social, living in tight-knit and exclusive family groups in dens termed ‘setts’. This led to the perception that badgers actively defend territorial borders and consequently rarely travel beyond their social-group boundaries.

This picture of the badger social system is so widely accepted that some badger culling and vaccination programmes rely on it – considering badger society as being divided up into discrete units, with badgers rarely venturing beyond their exclusive social-groups. But, the findings, newly published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, have revealed that badgers travel more frequently beyond these notional boundaries than first thought, and appear to at least tolerate their neighbours. Continue reading →