Habitat designed IOT (Internet of Things) rat luxury experience!
Social animals - like to live together - accommodate bunch of individuals in environment including privacy and shared space
Auto food and water dispensing
Maze areas - interactive - changes so it’s a real challenge - automatic - cognitive measure for individual rats - find baseline and how it changes over time
Multi-microphone acoustic monitoring to localise vocalisations from individual rats and see who they speak to…
Temperature and sensors for monitoring blood pressure + quickly monitor individual rats for nutrition and hydration
Sensory whisker experience - augmented tubes with vibration to provide greater enjoyment - would they like this?
Day / night simulation - allow them to have darkness Lots of cardboard play areas!
Memory, theory of mind, strength
Draw on past memory - touchscreen with thumbnails of previous interactions, to select and play (person looking back through videos)
Zoom call to previous friends now in other zoos - could communicate?
VR for same purpose - requires VR chimp -
E-sports system with hand-held baton
Learn game rules, then revisit game, can you recall the rules? (different games)
Frontal lobe function - display coloured triangles, squares, circles. Touch all triangles = win, then change rules and must touch all red shapes - interesting test of cognitive abilities - what’s the new rule?
Arborial memory - matching symbols in ipads in trees, locomote to travel to ipads in place, remember and get there
Smell - locate target odour, e.g., banana - and get reward
Explore real objects and match with picture - pix on screen, find object in environment
Theory of mind - schematic of happy and sad faces + photographs, choose match for schematic, build more emotions into this
AI problem - pictures of horses and stripes, still can’t distinguish a real zebra!
Super monkey model!
CHIMPS
BEES
Bees like drugs = plants with pesticides; managed bees out-compete wild bees - saving bees is a challenging problem for society
In chicken communities, there is always a bullied chicken, which is a natural behaviour.
Bee in a chicken costume, to compare species’ behaviours…
Bees can learn, so we can teach associations with dangerous thing. They don’t like electricity, so aversion therapy to avoid pesticides
Scale of the problem - not easy to contain. An invisible wall that separates and zaps managed bees to stop them from attacking wild BUT very large scale - would need to be everywhere
Policing - lawmaker robot bee that releases pheromones on pesticide flowers so bees tricked into thinking it’s been visited already
UV light demo to show how bees see the flowers.
Grow electric circuits inside flowers…
When bees get close, there’s an electric current - can bees learn from other bees and pass knowledge through generations?
Pheromone trail - managed bees entering space so create scent barriers to make them leave -
2 foxes - be careful with food, sensitive to sounds underground
Hill, moving to flat area
Hole in the hill, place computer inside simulating sound + pressure sensor near surface. Activation on pressure to release food via canon - to encourage pouncing - part of normal diet
Build platform instead of digging a hole
Avoid fence
Competition between humans and foxes - who gets button first, but not always a human present
Boppit game - twist, pull, press - remember sequence and perform on toy - inspiration for a game
Sounds, smells, haptics in different sequences, and foxes should pounce on in correct order?
Change structure of frame, pounce when they hear specific sounds - e.g. not wind, but yes a mouse then scatter feed
No competition between brothers, so forage after food released
All sounds coming together, select correct one as when hunting... Easy to change sounds in a modular system for longer term engagement
Interaction with public - changes perception of species by human - a tube with a chain in it that can be pulled by members of public to create sounds
Playdough fox with stairs!
ARCTIC FOXES
CHICKENS
To stop feather pecking in laying hens
Good sense of smell and very visual - what’s their environment? Like a carpark!
Sometimes have a hop-up for getting out of the way, or could be a layered system
Hard to detect things on the side
Prevention, husbandry = more space required
UV lights supposed to be good for stress and behavioural issues
Detect outbreaks of squawking - mitigate with distraction such as predator sound or scent - reduce light or increase airflow to interrupt behaviour
Reactions to predators - freeze or flight?
Add enrichment - laying chickens will contra-freeload, so not easy access to food. Bell to peck that lets food out, work hard!
Hanging salt-lick or hard feedables hanging so they can peck, bungee style objects, easy to sterilise and re-use
Visual stimulation - strips of LEDs along platform edges, programmable to provide interest if pecking happening
Intermittent acute stressors to increase natural behaviour - is noise too stressful?
Reset behaviour with an intervention - could be visual - shadow = origami hawk!
