—This paper presents CARNIVORE, a system for in-situ, yet unobtrusive monitoring of cryptic, difficult-tocatch/observe wildlife in their natural habitat. CARNIVORE consists of a network of mobile and static nodes that have sensing, processing, storage, and wireless communication capabilities. CARNIVORE’s compact, low-power, mobile animalbourne nodes are tasked with data collection (both sensing and communication), while static nodes’ main task is to get collected data from the CARNIVORE network to the Internet. One of CARNIVORE’s notable novel feautures is its robustness to intermittent node connectivity since, depending on the wildlife being studied, the network can be quite sparse and therefore disconnected frequently for arbitrarily long periods of time. To be able to support ”disconnected operation”, CARNIVORE uses an ”opportunistic routing” approach taking advantage of every encounter between nodes (mobile-to-mobile and mobile-to-static) to propagate data. In its ...