Jim Lotimer, CEO of Lotek Wireless, Fish and Wildlife Monitoring, in the company's lab and production floor in Newmarket, Ont., on Jan. 13, 2012.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
In the early 1980s, Jim Lotimer anticipated that he would lose his job as an electrical engineer with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources due to government cost-cutting.
He led the ministry’s wildlife-research telemetry lab, designing and developing animal-tracking devices for research and conservation purposes. But Mr. Lotimer, who had always dreamed of starting a business, did not let the situation get him down.
He left the ministry and formed the company known today as Lotek Wireless from the basement of his home in Aurora, Ont. Mr. Lotimer, who died Sept. 14 of pancreatic cancer at age 71 in Aurora, built Lotek into one of the world’s largest wildlife-telemetry companies.
Deployed in some 100 countries, Lotek’s devices have tracked more than 1,000 mammal, fish, bird and insect species, ranging from African elephants weighing five tonnes to Atlantic salmon smolts packing five grams and other critters toting even less than that.
“The list truly is endless,” said his son Dave Lotimer, now Lotek’s president, CEO and chief legal counsel.
David Johnston, a retired Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources chief rabies biologist who created its radio-telemetry lab and hired Jim Lotimer, said the company’s devices provide “unique biological information” that has protected numerous species.
“You can’t do anything [protection-wise] unless you know how a species functions, how it lives, how long it lives, how it migrates, where it migrates,” Mr. Johnston said.
Mr. Lotimer keeps bear cubs warm as Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources colleagues place a tracking collar on their hibernating mother in a den.Courtesy of Jane Lotimer
Lotek’s customers have ranged from oil and gas companies to forestry firms, power utilities, universities and governments. The company designs and builds radio, acoustic and satellite technology. Mr. Lotimer and the company have been credited with developing the first global-positioning-system (GPS) collars for wildlife and miniaturizing several different transmitters.
In November, 2021, a Lotek device helped American scientists find and destroy an Asian giant hornets’ nest near Blaine, Wash., located by a Vancouver-area border crossing. The insects possess a potentially fatal sting and attack honey bees that pollinate vital food crops.
James (Jim) Stanley Lotimer was born Jan. 28, 1951, in Ottawa. He was the lone son of Lloyd and Mary (née Rennie) Lotimer and the youngest of their four children.
Lloyd Lotimer was an Ontario Hydro engineer and manager. Mary Lotimer was primarily a homemaker.
Jim grew up in Belleville, Burlington and other places including Toronto’s Newtonbrook neighbourhood, where he became a top wrestler and was named his high school’s athlete of the year upon graduation. He went on to win bronze and gold medals at the 1970 Ontario Games and 1971 Canada Games, respectively.
Mr. Lotimer, who also wrestled at the university level, loved the outdoors and such activities as canoeing, camping and fishing. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, which offered co-operative work terms with various companies.
One day, he read a notice saying that Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources staff members would visit Waterloo to hire a co-op student for a job designing and developing animal-tracking technologies – an opportunity that was beyond his wildest dreams. But the interview schedule conflicted with an exam, so he asked a friend to run and ask Mr. Johnston and other ministry personnel to stay longer. They did.
“Otherwise, this whole [Lotek] business wouldn’t have probably started, because we would probably have hired somebody else,” said Mr. Johnston, who was impressed with how badly he wanted the job.
Mr. Lotimer, holding a speckled trout, converted his love for the outdoors into a career dedicated to wildlife conservation.Credit: Courtesy of Jane Lotimer
Mr. Lotimer parlayed his co-op position into a full-time role with the ministry after graduation from Waterloo, starting in 1976. Among other duties, he helped upgrade transmitters that Mr. Johnston used to track and vaccinate rabid Arctic foxes. Mr. Lotimer also helped produce tracking technology for ministry ornithologist Harry Lumsden who later earned membership in the Order of Canada for reintroducing trumpeter swans in Ontario after they had become extinct in the province.
After Mr. Lotimer foresaw the telemetry lab’s demise, he left the ministry, in what Mr. Johnston called a “mutual parting of ways,” along with colleagues Peter Anson and Stewart Strathearn and the trio launched Lotek in 1984.
“No one was applying modern technology to that particular application – the understanding of animal habitat and requirements,” Mr. Lotimer told the Globe in 2012. “[Initially], I didn’t want to build products, but there just wasn’t anybody doing it. So, in order to apply our own technology, we had to build it.”
Mr. Anson, who was a whiz kid fresh out of a George Brown College engineering technology program when Mr. Lotimer hired him at the ministry, described his initial role with Lotek as a “wacky science guy” interested in solving technical problems. Mr. Strathearn, now the mayor of Midland, Ont., ensured that the company produced the right products for biologists, and Mr. Lotimer provided the business structure in his capacity as president and CEO.
Mr. Lotimer financed Lotek by increasing the mortgage on his family’s home when it was almost paid off.
“Because he was so capable in everything he did, I didn’t really worry about it too much,” said his wife, Jane Lotimer. “If it didn’t work out, then I knew he could get a job.
“So it was a risk and he was doing something he loved. He never felt like he worked. He just felt like he was doing his passion and his art. So when somebody’s that engaged and enjoying what they’re doing, it’s worth taking a risk.”
Lotek’s early customers included the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, which disbanded its wildlife-telemetry lab after Mr. Lotimer left. The company developed a collar that ministry researchers used to track polar bears in James Bay, an inlet at the southern tip of Hudson Bay, between Ontario and Quebec.
“They put collars on the polar bears and then they would fly to track them from an airplane, so the airplanes would have an antenna specifically custom-made for the bottom of the small planes,” Ms. Lotimer said. “And then Jim would go up with the pilot and a biologist and he would have the headphones on the antenna and track where the polar bears had gone.”
Mr. Lotimer travelled the world to check on Lotek’s technology and often took Ms. Lotimer, who also worked with the company. She recalled one trip to Kenya when they ventured “right into the middle of a herd of elephants that was at least 50 strong.”
In 2011, Mr. Lotimer received the Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer award from the American Computer and Robotics Museum, joining such legendary recipients as DNA fingerprinting mastermind Sir Alec Jeffreys, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Mr. Anson, who helped launch Lotek when he was 25 and spent the rest of his career there before retiring as a vice-president, said Mr. Lotimer had a “tremendous instinct for business” and an unerring sense of how to manage, mentor and listen. And, he succeeded in balancing a diverse bottom-up, experiment-oriented “community” with top-down business constraints that prevented mistakes and financial loss.
“Maybe the most important thing is that [in Canada] we hired a cast of characters, like out of a utopian novel – really unbelievable,” Mr. Anson said.
Many Canadian locations’ early staff members included engineers who emigrated from China, the former Soviet Union and other countries, who remained with the company for decades.
Headquartered in Newmarket, Ont., Lotek now has more than 120 employees and operations in St. John’s, N.L., Britain, the United States and New Zealand.
Ms. Lotimer said Lotek has grown by adapting to different species and economic conditions in different regions – and “adding on diversity in lots of different ways.”
“It was a real, slow build – one customer at a time,” she said.
Despite the demands of the business, Mr. Lotimer was first and foremost a family man dedicated to Dave and daughters Heather, who works with Lotek, and Suzie, an Ottawa-based palliative care doctor, Jane Lotimer said.
“He really thought it was important for them to have life experience and explore the world and get an education – and then find something they could do to give back to the world,” she said.
Mr. Lotimer leaves Jane, his wife of 43 years; their three children and three grandchildren; and his sisters Holly and Mary. He was predeceased by his sister Isabel.