Each animal wears a GPS collar that does not stream a continuous position — it wakes on a fixed schedule, gets a satellite fix, stores it and sleeps to save power. This simulator moves every animal continuously underneath, but only records a track point at each scheduled fix, so the drawn trail is the same coarse picture a real biologist downloads from the collar.
- Transmission interval — how often the collar reports a fix. Shorter intervals draw a tighter, more faithful trail but drain the battery faster; longer intervals stretch battery life for years at the cost of missing fine movement detail (the line visibly "cuts corners" between fixes).
- Migration corridor — several animals independently drifting toward the same seasonal route causes their fixes to cluster along one band. Once enough fixes overlap that band, the corridor highlights — this is exactly how biologists infer shared routes from pooled collar data, not from watching a single animal.
- Geofencing — the glowing ring marks a protected reserve boundary. When a recorded fix falls outside it, the collar (in reality, over satellite or cellular uplink) triggers an alert — used to flag poaching risk or human-wildlife conflict in real deployments.
Real-world relevance: GPS-collar cost, weight and battery life are the central engineering trade-off in wildlife telemetry — every extra fix per day is power that isn't available next season, which is why researchers tune the interval per species and study goal.