Question: have u ever had a major breakthrough in your work

Zara Gladman answered on 17 Jun 2011:

Hey Tomo!

Ahhhhhh this questions is really difficult! I guess I’ve had a couple of breakthroughs, for example:

A couple of years ago, I went up to the north of Scotland to do a survey of white-clawed crayfish (an endangered species!). I had heard that they were living in a loch called Loch Croispol – a beautiful lake with lots of limestone rocks and turquoise water. I started looking for the crayfish… I put in crayfish traps and I searched under rocks. After one whole day, I still hadn’t found any crayfish! I was really worried!! How could I study them if I couldn’t find any? On my second day of searching, I was getting near to giving up when I turned over a big stone and wow!! a crayfish! I caught it, and turned over some more stones near it… and found more! It turned out that the crayfish were mostly living in a very small area of the loch. It was a breakthrough finding one at last!

Another breakthrough I’ve had was when I had the idea of using infra-red cameras to film crayfish at night. Crayfish are nocturnal which means they are only interesting to watch at night! During the day, they sit around and don’t do much. Once, I decided to stay up all night and watch them… I watched them from 8pm-5am (it was a long night! I drank a lot of coffee/ate loads of freddos). Unfortunately, the crayfish KNEW I was there and their behaviour was affected by me being there. But how was I supposed to watch the crayfish if I wasn’t there?! Then I had an idea – instead of sitting beside the crayfish and disturbing them, I would set up a camera that could film in the dark (an infra-red camera). The camera is hooked up to a video recorder and a screen that are in a different room. That way, I can watch or record what the crayfish do, without them knowing! 😀

I still have the camera set up now, if you want to know more then just ask and I can take a picture of it and show you!