When Disney Cruise Line opened its new island vacation spot within the Bahamas – Disney Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Level – it wasn’t only a trip spot for island guests. As an alternative, in coordination with its Animals, Science, and Setting (ASE) crew, the model launched a serious conservation mission that mixed wildlife biology with fashionable expertise, together with radio telemetry and 3D printing.
Whereas Disney Lookout Cay opened in June 2024, planning had been underway nicely earlier than then, with the ASE Conservation crew included from the beginning. A key choice was that Disney wouldn’t develop greater than 16% of the land.
“We were going to leave a lot of the critical habitat, such as forest habitat, intact for the animals that were already living there,” Lauren Puishys, a Conservation & Science Tech with Disney’s ASE crew, defined.
“We created an environmental impact analysis before any construction began,” Puishys stated. That then was an Environmental Administration plan, which was centered on studying in regards to the fowl inhabitants on the island and defending them.
Sustainability Week 2025
This text is a part of a sequence of sustainability-themed articles we’re operating to look at Earth Day 2025 and promote extra sustainable practices. Try all of our Sustainability Week 2025 content material.
The crew recognized key zones on the island that might stay untouched based mostly on the place birds had been nesting, migrating, or foraging – all gathered by means of on-the-ground fieldwork. “You’re collecting every bird you see, every bird you hear, and you’re just writing this down to make observations about how many of these birds are in this region,” Puishys stated.
One species shortly emerged as essential, although – the good lizard cuckoo. “They’re noisy, they’re really cool looking,” Puishys defined, calling them ‘incredibly smart.’ Now, to trace a inhabitants, although, by way of patterns when shifting across the island and the place they had been selecting to nest, Puishys and crew mixed outdated with new.
On this case, the crew turned to the artwork of 3D printing to get near the fowl species in query, after which, by means of radio telemetry, mapped them on the island.
“I need a very specific bird,” Puishys recalled telling her colleague, Jose Dominguez, a member of Disney’s ASE Behavioral Husbandry crew. Although he’s 3D modeled a wide range of enrichment objects for Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park, he didn’t essentially have expertise modeling birds, so he known as on different professional groups at Disney that did.
Disney has groups unsurprisingly well-versed in 3D modeling utilizing CADs and instruments like Blender. “They were like, ‘Oh, absolutely, I would love to work on this,’” defined Dominguez.
They collaborated for months, refining the mannequin by means of common Zoom calls. “Lauren provided her input on if it was too big or it needs an extra toe, things like that,” stated Dominguez. “Eventually, we got to our desired model shape, the great lizard cuckoo.”
The mannequin was printed in PLA, a plant-based plastic, which Dominguez stated is what Disney routinely makes use of for deployments in “behavior-based enrichment.” The mannequin was then coated with the identical sturdy out of doors paint used throughout properties. Extra particularly, “an open air acrylic-based UV-resistant paint, after which with a protecting clear coating on high.
The result? A decoy fowl coupled with audio recordings of actual fowl calls. It labored and was deployed.
“We had it down there with the speaker underneath it, and we had two different types of calls on there,” Puishys stated. “At one point, an actual great lizard cuckoo called back and forth to it… So it was actually trying to communicate with the model, which was incredible to see.”
We now have infrastructure round property on the rooftops of buildings and cell towers that’s truly created to select up that sign
Lauren Puishys, a Conservation & Science Tech with Disney’s ASE crew
Lastly, a fowl approached the decoy, and Puishys was prepared for it. “I was in the woods, out of sight from the cuckoo but in sight of the model, so I could see it myself. And then all I had to do was step out of the woods, and the bird was in the net.”
From there, the crew hooked up a solar-powered radio telemetry tag to trace the fowl. “So there’s small solar panels on it with a little antenna, and that’s giving off a radio frequency of 434 megahertz,” Puishys stated. “We have infrastructure around property on the rooftops of buildings and cell towers that’s actually created to pick up that signal, which has an associated identifying eight-digit number and letter code for that animal.”
Due to the tag and the infrastructure put in across the island in an unintrusive method, Puishys can now monitor fowl actions from her desk in Florida.
“We work pulling everything off of the cloud with an API key through the company, and we can just download it all to my desk using RStudio,” she stated. “We’ve had it up now since pre-construction and now have over 35 million data points associated with this.”
We’ve had it up now since pre-construction and now have over 35 million information factors related to this
Lauren Puishys, a Conservation & Science Tech with Disney’s ASE crew
That information is captured by means of a extremely structured array of nodes throughout the island, with about 25 of them being spaced round 400 meters aside.
Additional, the info is saved on these nodes, then despatched to the sensor station, which processes it and is uploaded by way of a mobile community in order that the crew can entry it from wherever. That features Puishys’s desk in Florida, and it’s probably the most information the ASE crew has ever collected on a terrestrial species.
For Puishys, probably the most thrilling half isn’t simply the success of the mission – it’s how early they had been introduced in. “I honestly think our involvement as a Conservation team in the development of Disney Lookout Cay was our biggest leap,” Puishys stated. “It kind of blew me away… and it was a big part about why I was so happy to join the team and help out with the project.”
The hope is that this method – one which blends science, tech, and collaboration – turns into a template for future initiatives. “We hope that it worked out well enough that we can kind of be an example or a good model for other construction projects moving forward,” Puishys stated.
