When Disney Cruise Line opened its new island destination in Bahamas – Disney Lookout Cay in Lighthouse Point – it was not only a vacation spot for visitors to the island. Instead, in coordination with its animal team, Science and Environment (ASE), the brand launched a large conservation project that combined fauna biology with modern technology, including radio-tame and 3D printing.
While Disney Lookout Cay opened its doors in June 2024, planning was underway before that, with the ASE conservation team included from the start. A key decision was that Disney will not develop more than 16% of the land.
“We were going to leave a lot of essential habitat, such as forest habitat, intact for the animals that already lived there,” said Lauren Puhys, a conservation and scientific technology with the Disney ASE team.
“We have created an environmental impact analysis before the start of any construction,” said Puhys. This then turned into an environmental management plan, which focused on learning the bird population on the island and protecting them.
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The team has identified key areas of the island which would remain intact depending on where the birds nest, migrate or the search for food – all gathered through work in the field on the ground. “You collect each bird you see, each bird you hear, and you simply write this to make observations on the number of these birds in this region,” said Puhys.
A species quickly appeared to be important, however – the big lizard cuckoo. “They are noisy, they are really cool,” said Puhys, calling them “incredibly intelligent”. Now, to follow a population, however, in terms of patterns when they moved to the island and where they chose Nid, Puhys and the team combined with the old with a new one.
In this case, the team turned to the art of 3D printing to get closer to the species of birds in question, then, by radio-telemetry, mapped them on the island.
“I need a very specific bird,” recalls Puhys saying to his colleague, Jose Dominguez, a member of the Disney Ase Behavioral breeding team. Although he shaped in 3D a variety of enrichment articles for the Disney animal theme theme park, he did not necessarily have experience in modeling birds, so he called other teams of experts in Disney who did.
Disney has teams without surprise well paid in 3D modeling using CADs and tools like Blender. “They were like,” Oh, absolutely, I would like to work there, “said Dominguez.
They collaborated for months, refining the model with regular zoom calls. “Lauren provided her contribution if she was too large or if she needs an additional toe, things like that,” said Dominguez. “Finally, we came to the form of the desired model, the Grand Cuckoo Lézard.”
The model was printed in PLA, a plant -based plastic, which, according to Dominguez, is Disney regularly uses for deployments in “enrichment based on behavior”. The model was then covered with the same durable external paint used between the properties. More specifically, “a UV -based acrylic -based UV paint outside, then with a clear protective coating on top.
The result? A lure bird coupled with audio recordings of real bird calls. It worked and was deployed.
“We had it there with the speaker below, and we had two different types of calls there,” said Puhys. “At one point, a real big cuckoo Lézard called the back and forth … So he was actually trying to communicate with the model, which was incredible to see.”
We have an infrastructure around the property on the roofs of buildings and cell towers which are really created to collect this signal
Lauren Puishys, a conservation and scientific technology with the Disney ASE team
Finally, a bird approached the lure and Puhys was ready for this. “I was in the woods, out of sight of the cuckoo but for the model, so I could see it myself. And then all I had to do was get out of the woods, and the bird was in the net. ”
From there, the team has attached a solar energy radio telemetry label to follow the bird. “So there are small solar panels on it with a little antenna, and this gives off a radio frequency of 434 megahertz,” said Puhys. “We have an infrastructure around the property on the roofs of buildings and cell towers which is really created to recover this signal, which has a number and a letter code and a belt letter for this animal.”
Thanks to the label and the infrastructure installed around the island in a without intrusion, Puhys can now follow the movements of birds from its office in Florida.
“We work while removing cloud with an API key through the company, and we can download everything from my desk by using RSTUDIO,” she said. “We have done so now since pre-construction and we now have more than 35 million data points associated with this.”
We have done so now from pre-construction and we now have more than 35 million data points associated with this
Lauren Puishys, a conservation and scientific technology with the Disney ASE team
These data is captured through a range of nodes very structured across the island, with around 25 of them being spaced about 400 meters.
In addition, the data is stored on these nodes, then sent to the sensor station, which process it and is downloaded via a cellular network so that the team can access anywhere. This includes the office of Puhys in Florida, and these are the most data that the ASE team has ever collected on a terrestrial species.
For Puishys, the most exciting part is not only the success of the project – it is how they were brought early. “I honestly think that our involvement as a conservation team in the development of Disney Lookout Cay was our biggest jump,” said Puhys. “It sort of breathtaking me … and it was a large part of the reason why I was so happy to join the team and help the project.”
Hope is that this approach – the one that mixes science, technology and collaboration – becomes a model for future projects. “We hope it worked well enough so that we can be an example or a good model for other construction projects in the future,” said Puhys.
