End of Phase Trial: Student Deployment

We have recently completed the school holidays here in South Taranaki.  As part of our trial we wanted to have student (Year Five and Six, ten and eleven year old students) use and deploy the sound lures during the break with two goals - to monitor the results that would come as a result.

The results were limited due to the possum take being limited during the two week window.   There were five locations that deployed with two different set up. At each location a sound lure and a Timms trap at one location and a Timms and a no sound lure.   Four of the locations had no strikes at either (that is there were no possum takes during the two weeks).   At the fifth location, there were three strikes and all of these occurred at the location of the sound lure - including the possum shown in the picture in the top left hand corner.   All three possums appear to have been drawn towards the location from where the sound lure was emitting sound and have then been caught in the Timms trap.

Ideally the results from this deployment would like to be more robust however they are what they are and the students had an opportunity to run a trial for two weeks independently.   The next step in the process is running additional trials but targeting locations where we are able to interact with adults who are involved in possum trapping.

We intend to revisit the farm location that we were monitoring with the cameras and sound lures last year, as well as a number of other locations in Taranaki.   We are also mindful of the developing situation potentially with COVID-19 and the Delta variant here in New Zealand and that limiting or the potential to limit the final possum part of our project.

Our Curious Minds Project is drawing to a close which will end a significant phase of our project - we will end the possum focus and start diversifying as we end the major focus of the project.

As always we are looking for potential trails and if you are interested in either discussing this project or using the technology that we have developed then you are welcome to contact us.