When Disney Cruise Line opened its new island destination at the Bahamas – Disney Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point – it wasn’t just a resort for the island’s visitors. Instead, the brand launched a large conservation project that combined wildlife biology with modern technology, including radio elemetry and 3D printing II in coordination with its animals, science and environment (ASE).
While Disney Lookout Cay opened in June 2024, planning was started well before then, with the ASE preservation team included from the start. An important decision was that Disney would not develop more than 16% of the Earth.
“We had to leave a lot of the critical habitat, such as forest habitat, intact for the animals that already lived there,” explained Lauren Puishys, a Conservation & Science Tech with Disney’s Ase Team.
“We created an environmental impact analysis before any construction began,” Puishys said. It then became an environmental management plan that was focused on learning about the bird population on the island and protecting them.
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The team identified key zones on the island that would remain untouched based on where birds were chopping, wandering or feeding-all over the mark. “You gather any bird you see, every bird you hear, and you just write this down to make observations about how many of these birds are in this region,” Puishys said.
However, a species quickly emerged as important – the big lizard cuckoo. “They are noisy, they are really cool looks,” Puishys explained, calling them ‘incredibly smart.’ Now, however, to track a population, in terms of patterns as they move around the island and where they chose to nest, combined Puishys and Team Old with new.
In this case, the team turned to the art of 3D printing to get close to the bird species in question, and then through radio elemetry mapped them on the island.
“I need a very specific bird,” Puishys remembered telling his colleague, Jose Dominguez, member of Disney’s ASE behavior breeding team. Although he is 3D who modeled a number of enrichment topics for Disney’s Animal Kingdom -Temapark, he did not necessarily have experience in modeling birds, so he called for other expert teams at Disney who did.
Disney has team surprisingly well versed in 3D modeling using cads and tools as a blender. “They were like,” oh, absolutely, I would very much like to work on this, “Dominguez explained.
They collaborated for months and refined the model through regular zoom calls. “Lauren gave her input on whether it was too big or it needs an extra toe, similar things,” Dominguez said. “Eventually we came to our desired model form, the big lizard cuckoo.”
The model was printed in PLA, a plant -based plastic that Dominguez said is what Disney routinely uses for implementations in “behavior -based enrichment.” The model was then coated with the same durable outdoor paint used across properties. More specifically “an outdoor acrylic-based UV resistant paint and then with a protective clear coating on top.
The result? A lure bird combined with sound recordings of real bird calls. It worked and was deployed.
“We had it down there with the speaker under it, and we had two different types of calls there,” Puishys said. “At one point, an actually big lizard called Cuckoo back and forth to it … so it actually tried to communicate with the model, which was incredible to see.”
We have infrastructure around property on the roofs of buildings and cell towers actually created to retrieve this signal
Lauren Puishys, a Conservation & Science Tech with Disney’s Ase -Team
Finally, a bird approached the lure bird and Puishys was ready 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 go out of the woods and the bird was in the net.”
From there, the team enclosed a solar-powered radio elemetry roof to track the bird. “So there are small solar panels on it with a small antenna, and it gives off a radio frequency of 434 Megahertz,” Puishys said. “We have infrastructure around property on the roofs of buildings and cell towers that have actually been created to retrieve this signal, which has an associated identifying eight-digit number and letter code for that animal.”
Thanks to the brand and infrastructure installed around the island in a non -intrusive way, Puishys can now track bird movements from her desk in Florida.
“We are working to pull everything out of the cloud with an API key through the company, and we can just download it all to my desk using Rstudio,” she said. “We have been up now since the pre -building and now have over 35 million data points associated with this.”
We have been up now since the pre -building and now have over 35 million data points associated with this
Lauren Puishys, a Conservation & Science Tech with Disney’s Ase -Team
This data is captured through a very structured series of nodes over the island, where approx. 25 of them are distributed about 400 meters apart.
Furthermore, the data is stored on these nodes, then sent to the sensor station, which processes them and uploaded via a cellular network so that the team can access it anywhere. It includes Puishy’s desk in Florida, and these are the most data that the ASE team has ever collected in a earth -based species.
For Puishys, the most exciting part is not just the project’s success – it’s how early they were brought in. “I honestly think our commitment as a conservation team in the development of Disney Lookout Cay was our biggest jump,” Puishys said. “It blew me a little away … and it was a big part about why I was so happy to join the team and help with the project.”
The hope is that this approach – one that blends science, tech and collaboration – will be a template for future projects. “We hope it worked well enough that we can be an example or a good model for other construction projects that move on,” Puishys said.
