Infrared Camera In Protected Area Accidentally Captured Snake Activity
Recently, when sorting out the video data of the infrared cameras in the wild, Guanshan Nature Reserve accidentally discovered a scene of a black-browed snake moving on a tree. Snakes are cold-blooded animals, and their body temperature is very close to the surface temperature. Generally, snakes cannot trigger the infrared camera to work. Since 2010, Guanshan Nature Reserve has used infrared cameras to monitor wild animals. It has captured tens of thousands of monitoring video images, but has never captured cold-blooded animals such as invertebrates, fish, amphibians and reptiles. The infrared camera that captured the snake this time was previously deployed by Guanshan Nature Reserve and Professor Li Yankuo's team from Jiangxi Normal University in the joint wildlife monitoring process.
In response to this discovery, technical personnel at the nature reserve analyzed that the reasons may be the following: First, the snake had just preyed on a warm-blooded animal in the tree, such as birds, mice, squirrels, etc., and its body temperature briefly increased, forming a temperature difference with the environment; second, while the snake was preying in the tree, a warm-blooded animal escaped from the side and triggered the camera. Due to the delay in the camera startup, the fleeing animal was not captured, but the chasing snake was captured instead; third, although snakes are cold-blooded animals, because they were moving in the trees at the time, their body temperature increased under the sunlight, and the close-range infrared camera was still triggered and activated by the inconspicuous temperature difference.
