All this got my head spinning. The Max Planck Institute of Ornithology now tracks 223 individual birds with the app, and ultimately plans to include "tens of thousands of individuals and dozens of species," including mammals, project coordinator Daniel Piechowski told me earlier this year. Since they already collect location data from thousands of research projects and hundreds of species in their MoveBank database, it's only a small thing to open that data to the public, giving everyday people live access to wildlife around the world.

Biologists are wiring up nature like never before with GPS trackers, live nest cams, camera traps, and other technologies. Scientists are even thinking about ways animals could talk through the Internet to us. We're not there yet, but when that happens, will people care to go to a zoo at all?

Last summer in New York magazine, Benjamin Wallace-Wells opined that "we're pretty rapidly reaching the end of the era of the modern urban zoo." The piece wasn’t totally joyous about that fact. Wallace-Wells loves zoos. I do too. I spent many childhood weekends at Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and I continue to visit as often as possible as an adult. It's almost a holy place to me, a shrine to nature.

And yet, every visit comes with a bit of guilt. Even though I know the animals are well cared for, I also know that they are wild animals in captivity. I wouldn't want to be in an enclosure, no matter how nice. I push back my anthropomorphizing tendencies as much as I can, but I also relish them. Zoos make me feel, and that's part of what's wonderful about them.

But my guilty feelings may be grounded in reality, argues Wallace-Wells. Animal behavior seems to reveal that animals don't want to be in enclosures, either:

A giraffe who freaks out about men with large cameras, a brown bear whose cage door is the subject of his obsessive compulsive disorder, a 5,000-pound killer whale who shows her trainer who is boss by dragging him underwater for just about as long as he can live, before letting him go—these episodes seem like something more complicated than simple errors of confinement. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in some way the animals understand that the world around them is an artificial one, that these phobias and psychotic episodes represent reactions to that artifice, or subversions of it.

If that’s the case, how can we justify keeping animals in zoos? Wallace-Wells asks. His conclusion is that we can’t, and that we won’t continue to try for much longer. I’m not sure I agree. But there are certainly bits and pieces of zoos that could be handed over to technology. The educational aspect of zoos would be relatively easy to make virtual. And since zoo animals don't really act as they would in nature (even when they're not psychotic), it's hard to argue that zoos can convey much about the animals other than how they look. And while many zoos attempt to share a lot of material about conservation, it’s not clear how much of that is getting through to visitors. Certainly, technology that connects people to animals in the wild could reveal far more about the animals's actual behaviors as well as the need for conservation. If kids just want to see an animal up close, they can go to a farm or get a pet.