Preparing for Dissertation Day:
Having finished the camera trap setup guide and the new website, remaining on the to-do list is the mini mammals field guide. Many of the new images to add to the field guide are on the mammals computer, which is being used by my teammates.
I have been working on the presentation and script for Dissertation Day, along with my teammates, Ana Diehl and Bruno Camiselle. We broke up the work into multiple section, and I have been focusing thus far on the plaster prints section. There are two slides, one explaining the purpose of making plaster prints and the other explaining the steps. Plaster of Paris is mixed with water to create a sludge that is poured into clean pawprints, and when dried, it forms an almost perfect model of the print. We made several of such prints in Costa Rica, but we were only able to retrieve the Tapir prints due to time. We found two side by side prints, a mother and baby tapir, and both casts were clean and easily identifiable.
