Tahi Rua Toru Tech Competition - National Finalists

At the end of last week we received notification that we had received a wildcard entry into the Tahi Rua Toru (123 Tech) National Finals.  This is a significant achievement for our studnets who are a team of Year 5/Six Students who have been selected as national finalists in a Y5-8 Competition.   We are thrilled with this recognition of the students and the hard work that they have been making throughout the year on their project.   They have the opportunity to present via Zoom to a panel of experts on their project this week and results will be announced next week.

We have finalised our speakers for the unit and made futher developments at looking at powering of the units.    We also have an issue to address that has been evident from recent photographs that have been recorded on our trail cameras - that is we can clearly see that Brush Tailed Possums are targetting the units and interacting with them.    Clearly in the series of photos that are shown on the left the brush tailed possum can be seen ignoring the traps that are baited with peanut butter and fruit (apple) and instead interacts directly with the sound lure.  This is not an isolated incident - at the same location there is an almost identical series of interactions and images a week later from a second possum, that spends time at the location and interacts specificall with the lure.   

We are currently still contemplating out options but one certain possibility is placing the sound lure in conjunction with another form of trap, such as a live capture trap, which the possum would have to enter the cage to interact with the sound lure and trigger a footplate.     

In the latest series of images and data gathering from our location we have again a contrast between the sound lure location and the non- sould lure location.    During the past seven days we have had a single activation at the non sound lure site.  At the sound lure site there has been in comparison some significant activity - twenty one activations with six possums at the site.   

Furthermore two of the possums have clearly directly been in contact with the sound lure, pulling at the wires and knocking the solar panel off its placement location - which has raised a question as to how long the unit has been activating as a result.    

These results continue to be promising at this location - we have had variations of the unit in place since early September and there is a clear pattern developing.  

At the non sound lure location we now have a cumulative total of thirty pest identifcations and 121 acivations.  As a ratio to activations/deployment of 0.49 activations per day of pest animals and 0.50 over the timeframe (essentially we expect at this site to have an activation and a pest every second day on average [over sixty days at present].

At the sound lure location we have a sixty one pest identifications and 204 activations.  As a ratio to activations/deployment of 3.13 activations per day of pest animals have been visible 0.93 times a day.

However it needs to be noted that we have changed the deployment several times since we started - including putting a sound lure externally on the trap box to increase the volume.  When that is considered the activations/deployment increases to 3.56 activations per day and 1.35 times a day. 

We continue to remind oursleves that while these figures are extremely pleasing they are extremely early in our research and data collection.