Rhino Foobler Construction Update #2!

Happy Wednesday! I hope everyone had a lovely and relaxing Thanksgiving. We've received an update on the final construction stages of the rhino Foobler from the TGiF team and we thought you all might be interested. But first, in other news, the paper on crowdfunding science projects that we were invited to contribute to has been accepted! Thanks to the hard work of Dr. Holly Ganz and Katie Dahlhausen, a graduate student at UC Davis, the paper will appear in the Journal of Microbiology Education in March. Dr. Ganz successfully funded her study of cat microbiomes through Kickstarter, you may have seen the project video which was pretty hilarious (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/catbiome/kitt...). Katie raised funds to help her study the impact of antibiotics on the health of koalas (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-koala-proje...). The paper discusses our experiences using different crowd funding platforms and what approaches we found to work best. Thank you to everyone who responded to the survey email we sent out in June and July, as we used the data we collected on your locations and motivations for contributing in the paper! The TGiF team came and picked up the Foobler prototype from the zoo after we gave it to the rhinos in September. If you recall, the Foobler we gave the rhinos on World Rhino Day was only a shell without the internal feeding mechanism installed. Earlier this week they sent us some photos and video of the internal mechanism, so here you are!

 

Mounted inside the ball is a 5 gallon plastic bucket. During the September trial, the buckets only had food inside them for the rhinos to knock out, but the final version will have this mechanism installed.

 

This is the drive shaft that will mount underneath the bucket and rotate the lid on top of the bucket. In the dog sized Foobler, the motor rotates all six food pods inside the toy, but for the rhino Foobler the TGiF guys decided to rotate the lid over the pods instead. Turns out 24 apples are surprisingly heavy.

 

I don't have a comment for this, other than fasteners are always important.

 

This is the inside of the bucket with the lid removed. The motor, mounted at the bottom, will spin the lid between pods, allowing food loaded into each pod to come out when the rhinos play with the toy. And here's the whole mechanism in action:

-Bethany