Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas

This marmoset monkey, for instance, researchers gave a light switch where they were able to turn on and off a light inside their own enclosure.

From having this light switch, what researchers find is they would continually turn on and off this light.

And they suspect they do this not because they want the light, but because it gives them control over their environment.

It gives them predictability.

And so you can see it's really confusing and sometimes unknown and complex on why animals would use technology in the first place.

So I kept developing different devices for animals, from heating devices, audio devices, and different video devices.

But I started to realize that we still control the most fundamental part of our animals' lives, which is the social lives.

Global lockdown taught us that we as humans, when we are isolated, it is bad for our mental health.

And the same could be said for many different sorts of animals.

Many animals live naturally in the wild in really big groups.

Parrots fly in flocks of hundreds, dogs run in packs.

Primates often live in really complex groups, such as chimpanzees, which come together and then go apart in a process called fission fusion.

And when we keep animals in captivity for practical reasons, we don't always keep them in the same groups.

There's limited cost, there's limited space, and also sometimes behavioral management.

Recently, I visited an aquarium and the head of research there was showing me the fish that they keep to one side because they're naughty and fight with other fish.

And so even these animals you can see sometimes are separated.

So I started to wonder, what if we could use technology to connect these animals together?

What if we could use video calls to do this?

We as humans have used video calls, and this has benefited us a lot.

Would animals want this, and would they use this?