CAMERAS WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Week 4
Josh n -
What’s up guys! I’m back now and I finally have cameras! I went in yesterday morning with Morgan to set up a test run! She charged the batteries over break, so one is full charged and the other is half full, but this was our first time trying to set them up so we didn’t have all that we needed. We were missing straps that run through the back and around whatever we want to mount them to, so they are just resting on the ground. We looked through the settings (they didn’t have an instruction manual with them) and set them to video but decided against time lapse, and set the PIR to every 30 seconds. PIR stands for passive infrared sensor, and with a quick Google search we determined that that meant whenever the sensor detects movement, it will record for 30 seconds. We then set the sensor’s sensitivity to high so we don’t miss anything, set the date and time to be correct, and turned on the stamp on the video. Setting them up was way simpler than I expected (I don’t know what I thought it would be, we literally just set them on the ground), and we let them run overnight.
This morning I went back in with another NAU student who does research in the vivarium to check the footage and repaint the snakes during their health and weight checks. Finding them all was a guarantee because they’re still on lockdown in the hibernation boxes, and because there are only four now :(. The only other issue we ran into was getting the paint on the snakes as some of our pens were not found or not working. Each snake has a unique color code as I’m pretty sure I mentioned earlier, and the four in my vivarium have silver, red black red, black black black, and black red red. We couldn’t find a red that worked or a silver at all, so we improvised. For the time being 071 (usually silver) is white and 9R and 10R had their reds changed to orange. (I’m pretty sure I’m colorblind with reds and oranges anyway so this works out fine). After I painted them all, I retrieved the cameras and took them inside. I took out the SD cards, put them in my computer, and there was footage! Huzzah! However, one of the cameras was accidentally set to time lapse, which when looking at the data I can confirm it will not be useful for looking at snakes, it’s way too fast. That camera also fell over at some point so its a long ceiling timelapse haha. Otherwise everything seemed correct, so I just changed the second camera off time lapse and set them back up! If all goes well, and the snakes’ lockdown ends, I’ll have real data next week! Thanks for reading!
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