Suspected thieves have put a damper on a hands-on learning experience for SFU biology students on Burnaby Mountain.
Last semester, teaching assistants Allison Cornell and Raime Fronstin tried to liven up their undergraduate biology tutorials with a project that saw students set up 11 motion-sensitive cameras to capture animal activity along Burnaby Mountain’s many trails.
By the end of their six-week experiment, however, four of the cameras, worth about $200 each, were gone.
“I was really fun,” Cornell told the NOW. “I’d love to just leave them out permanently and then get data all the time, but four cameras when we put out 11, that’s almost half of them.”
Cornell said she and Fronstin introduced the project to give their undergrads a taste of what it’s like to work like real scientists.
“The way we teach science doesn’t necessarily mirror what scientists actually do,” Cornell said. “When you’re actually working as a scientist doing research, you’re not going home and reading a textbook. That’s not what we do in the lab. We ask questions; we try and figure things out. We deal with problems, like camera theft. If this was my thesis project, I’d have to figure out a way to deal with that.”
But hiding the cameras from thieves for future projects would be a challenge, Cornell said, because large game animals tend to prefer using human-made trails, so cameras can’t be placed too far off the beaten path.
The cameras that survived last semester’s experiment, meanwhile, yielded some interesting footage, including a number of photos of coastal black-tailed deer, a bobcat and a man discreetly peeing.
The latter was a class favourite, according to Cornell, who was quick to add the photo didn’t show the man’s face or any other distinguishing body parts.
