The cave-dwelling olm: a sentinel for environmental change – LifeWatch Slovenia on Nautilus Magazine
ProteusWatch vLab’s Research, part of the LifeWatch Slovenia Consortium, has been featured on Nautilus Magazine.
Deep beneath Europe’s karst landscapes lives the olm (Proteus anguinus), a pale, blind amphibian once thought to be the offspring of dragons. Elusive and long-lived, it is exquisitely sensitive to changes in groundwater quality and temperature, making it a living gauge of ecosystem health in subterranean aquifers that supply drinking water to millions.
Since 1960, the Tular Cave Laboratory in Kranj, Slovenia, has advanced olm research and conservation from a unique underground facility. Building on innovations that ranged from early CCTV systems to digital infrared video, the team has revealed the behaviour and ecology of olm, from its unique cave-related sensoric capabilities to reproduction. Yet caves are dangerous and difficult to access, and lab studies can only go so far.
To bridge this gap, the research team from the Tular Cave Laboratory together with their colleagues from Karst Research Institute ZRC SAZU (both partners in LifeWatch Slovenia Consortium), and in partnership with LifeWatch ERIC Virtual Lab Innovation Center (the Netherlands), have mapped out plans for the ProteusWatch Virtual Lab: a virtual cave laboratory that brings long-term, in-situ monitoring to the karst underworld. Combining low-impact video analysis, machine learning, advanced sensors, imaging sonar and underwater drones, ProteusWatch aims to observe the olm’s behaviour – movement, foraging, interactions and breeding – in real time, without disturbing its fragile habitat. A second virtual lab, the Karst Groundwater Virtual Lab, will track groundwater dynamics to assess ecosystem stability and pressures of pollution.
“The main reason for building the cave laboratory 65 years ago was to circumvent the inaccessibility of Proteus’ natural habitat and allow long-term observations under more controlled conditions,” said Gregor and Magdalena Aljančič. “With advanced technologies, the idea of studying olms in the wild is becoming more and more realistic. The new approach would not only be more efficient but could also save lives.”
Christos Arvanitidis, CEO of LifeWatch ERIC, is backing the team’s efforts as a new leading example of accessible, multidisciplinary science. “You can show your data to other communities in [a] way they can take advantage of, prove to them that this type of research can be done, and they can perhaps use their own data, for the same kind of analysis,” he says. “That’s amazing, because it leads progressively to a kind of knowledge which is produced by as many data, from as many domains, as possible.”
Read the full article on Nautilus Magazine.
Photo credit: Gregor Aljančič.