Mechanical Reliability of Devices Subdermally Implanted into the Young of Long-Lived and Endangered Wildlife

Service data does not exist for the strength of enclosures for subdermally implanted biotelemetry devices intended for young wild animals. Developing adequate tests especially for implants intended for endangered species is difficult due to the very limited availability of live animals and cadaverous tissue, ethical concerns about using them, and high enclosure costs. In this research, these limitations were overcome by taking a conservative approach to design and testing. Reliability tests were developed and performed to establish the likelihood that a thin subdermally and cranially implanted alumina enclosure would fail due to typical external forces related to diving, fights, and falls over the expected 30-year life time of sea lions. Cyclic fatigue tests indicative of deep dives performed out of tissue and at the 90% reliability level indicated no failure after 70,000 stress cycles at stresses of approximately 15 MPa; dynamic fatigue tests indicated a 5% probability of failure at 250 MPa; and puncture tests indicative of fight bites showed a 5% probability of failure at 1500 N. These values were far outside of what the animals might expect to encounter in real life. On the other hand, the response of the enclosure to impact outside of the tissue was failure at a mean energy level of 6.7 J. Modeling results predict that head impacts due to trampling by fighting sea lion males and falls over 1 m onto a rocky ledge typical of haul out environments would likely fracture an infant’s head as well as the implant. The device can be implanted under an impact absorbing 1 cm blubber layer for extra protection. More service data for enclosures can be made more available despite limited availability of test animals if a conservative approach to testing is taken.