Penelope J. Wilson

Penelope J. Wilson

Santa Rosa, CA

Sonoma State University

Graduate Student

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Published on Sep 10, 2015

We did it!

WE DID IT! At 10pm (PDT) on September 10, 2015, we reached our funding goal!! The lemurs are getting their smart feeders and we get to study how the predictability of enrichment af...

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Published on Sep 04, 2015

VIDEO: Meet the Keeper: Liz!

Liz wrote a short bio for us to get to know her:"Elizabeth Abram Besides working on cattle and horse ranches, goat and llama farms and boarding stables I have worked at 3 other zoos ...

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Published on Sep 08, 2015

Meet the Undergraduate Research Assistants!

Not only does our project promise to further enhance the lives of the lemurs at Oakland Zoo, it is also providing valuable research experience for two excellent undergraduates. Here's a little bit ...

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Published on Aug 26, 2015

Meet the lemurs! Blue-eyed Black Lemur edition

If you are a backer or a returning visitor, welcome back!If you are a new visitor, welcome! We hope you will be as excited about our lemur smart feeders as we are when you learn more about them. Yo...

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Published on Aug 26, 2015

Meet the lemurs! Ring-tailed edition

If you are a backer or a returning visitor, welcome back!If you are a new visitor, welcome! We hope you will be as excited about our lemur smart feeders as we are when you learn more about them. Yo...

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Published on Aug 24, 2015

What is a lemur?!

Fig. 1: Primate taxonomyLemurs are primates, the order of mammals that also includes monkeys (like baboons), apes (like chimpanzees), and humans. Many people think lemurs don't look...

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Published on Aug 21, 2015

Enrichment protocol: Certainty of reward

In Lab Note #1, we answered the question, "What is enrichment?" and in Lab Note #2, our video shows how an Arduino UNO board programmed by Arduino software will allow us to change the time of day t...

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Published on Aug 19, 2015

VIDEO: Our lemur smart feeder!

Want to learn more about the lemur smart feeder? This video explains how the smart feeder works and shows it in action! We will use the Arduino program to alter the...

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Thanks so much! And we'll definitely keep our backers updated!
Sep 11, 2015
Using smart feeders to increase lemur activity and stimulate human interest
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Hi Louise! GREAT questions! We are expecting the lemurs to learn the sound, but hopefully any issues of anticipatory behavior will be addressed by us altering the predictability of reward in the different phases of the project. You can see more about that in the lab note entitled "Enrichment protocol: certainty of reward". To avoid the dominant lemurs hogging the food we will have 8 feeders for 6 lemurs. The dominant lemurs will have a hard time being at all the feeders at once. And yes! I will be observing and we have 2 Sonoma State undergrads too. We have been collecting baseline data for 3 months and when we have the funding to build the smart feeders, we will continue observing through the different phases of certainty of reward. Thanks for asking! -Penelope
Sep 01, 2015
Using smart feeders to increase lemur activity and stimulate human interest
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Thanks so much for your support!
Aug 30, 2015
Using smart feeders to increase lemur activity and stimulate human interest
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