Recent content by Peter Apps

Well, thank you for your inputs. I disagree that the problem is "fun" - elephants damaging equipment and pushing cameras out of alignment are a serious drain on resources and productivity is an under-resourced project with a very serious aim; to find new ways of managing large predator behaviour...

There are no repellents there as yet - I am running with no scent as a control. In any case the scent will not be at the cameras; it will be in dispensers 5 m from two of the cameras at each array and 15 m from the other two. In an earlier study elephants took no special notice of the repellent...

I am sure that you are right that there will be paper or two on successful solutions. I think that it is important to stress that these elephants are not "rampaging"; they do not come charging in and butt the poles with their heads, they approach quite deliberately, sniff around, then kick or...

Potentially it is a confounding factor, and I am sure that referees will bring it up when I submit the paper, but the two conditions happen consecutively and the repellent effect I am looking for is a very obvious contrast to the leopards usual behaviour of ignoring the dispensers completely - I...

That's a very handy document, though I will have to look at very carefully to make sure I interpret in correctly. The 500 kg is a guess, but an informed one based on elephants being able to kick harder than they can lift. They will not get their heads down to 1 m to push with their heads. Worse...

The ground is for the most part a sandy clay mix. It gets very soft when it is wet - and this year we have had getting on for three times the annual average rain - which makes it easier for animals to push things over, but also easier to drive the poles in deeper. There is nothing I can do about...

If angle is a lot weaker than square tube of similar dimensions then the square tube would be the way to go, and there would be no good size of angle. From looking at the videos and the state of the poles after elephants have finished with them I suspect that the elephants first twist the pole...

Thank you again. Deflection while the elephant is busy with its engineering is no problem, as long as the pole recovers to its original position afterwards. If I could make a flexible pole that would stand up again I would give it a try. I suspect that a determined elephant could exert more than...

Thank you - I look forward to seeing what you get.

Great ! That's what I've been looking for. That is a much heavier pole than I had thought, though not entirely impractical. Hammering it into the ground will be a mission though ! Would you mind looking at what load a 50 x 50 x 3mm square tube could recover from under the same conditions. I...

That would work but would need three times as much steel and three times as much hammering of stakes into the ground.

The 1 degree repeatability in aim comes from tests I did on angle of dip and tilt using a dog the same size as a leopard as a target under controlled test conditions, and from the requirement to have the cameras covering overlapping areas but not dazzling one another with their IR floodlights...

It's a thought, but has two disadvantages that I can think of. First how to anchor it to the ground - driving in three poles to the depth and angle to allow them to be joined at the top will not be simple. Screw anchors might work, but up goes the cost and complexity. Second - the elephants will...

Electric fencing that is strong enough to deter elephants works at 80 000 V and makes a loud click every time a pulse fires down the wire - the clicks will deter other animals from coming near the site, so I will get no useful data. Also the fences are power hungry and very difficult to isolate...

Brilliant idea, as long as they don't cost any more than 2m of 50x50 square tube