Busy Weekend for the Lab Assistant

While Breathitt has been busy asking the big questions, Dad, her faithful lab assistant, has had a pretty busy weekend turning those questions into an actual project.

The Surface Sand Boa Project now has its permanent home at SurfaceSandBoaProject.org, and we’ve been working on everything behind the scenes that will eventually connect the snakes, cameras, observations and data together.

The website is now taking shape with areas for the project methods, individual animal profiles, live cameras, behavioral data, family trees, project updates and our Lab Notes. Most of those sections are intentionally pretty empty right now, because we haven’t started the experiment yet.

That’s exactly how we want it.

As the project grows, you’ll be able to watch those empty pages fill with real animals, real observations and eventually multiple generations of data.

We’ve also been designing the technology behind the observation system. Each snake will have a permanent QR-linked identity, so even when animals or enclosures are moved around the rack, their observations, weights, feedings, sheds, health records and eventually breeding history stay connected to the correct individual.

The cameras will continuously observe the rack, while our computer-assisted system will help identify surface activity, emergence, reburial and other behaviors. Just as importantly, we’re designing the system so a camera outage or uncertain observation can never accidentally be counted as a snake being underground.

There’s still a lot to build, test and probably rebuild when Dad discovers that version one wasn’t nearly as clever as he thought it was.

That’s part of the fun.

Up next: project email accounts. Our next glamorous piece of scientific equipment is… email. We’re setting up dedicated @SurfaceSandBoaProject.org email accounts so project correspondence, research questions, breeder communication, collaboration requests and website messages can stay organized separately from our personal email.

It may not be as exciting as cameras, snakes or 3D-printed equipment, but if this really becomes the 10-year project we’re planning, getting the boring organizational pieces right at the beginning will probably save Breathitt’s lab assistant a lot of headaches later.

One weekend at a time, we’re turning a seven-year-old’s question into a real experiment.