Scientists Rack Up Massive Phone Bill By Tracking Migrating Eagles

Thanks to the ongoing work of researchers, we are slowly unraveling more secrets of the world around us, but as you might have figured out, sometimes research does not come cheap. This is what Russian scientists have learnt when they were tracking the migrating patterns of eagles, where they were presented with a pretty huge phone bill at the end.

The research involved tracking migrating eagles and to do that, scientists attached trackers that would send an SMS pinpointing the coordinates of the eagles as they migrated. The scientists would then use satellite photos to see if those birds might have reached their destination safely. However, due to the birds flying over multiple countries, this naturally incurred higher costs.

For example, one of the birds flew to Iran from Kazakhstan. However, due to it flying out of the range of local networks, it accumulated a backlog of SMS messages which were later sent when arrived in Iran. Apparently, this particular bird ended up using the entire tracking budget for all the eagles.

The scientists later took to social media to try and crowdfund the bill to help top up their credits so that their research could continue, but luckily, Russian carrier Megafon later stepped in and offered to cancel their entire bill, and put the project on a special and cheaper program to allow the researchers to continue their work.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Science