Prior Work: CRoAK

What happens when you have to characterize the behavior of a large number of frogs, but you only have three days in which to do it, and you need over one hundred frogs to make your work statistically significant? In working on this question with Mark Bee and Saumya Gupta of the UMN EEB Frog Lab, we decided on making a system that would allow us to swap a plate in and out of a soundproof chamber, cutting down the time needed per test subject by more than 65%. Mark decided that we needed a good, froggy name for what we’d been referring to as the “Frog Trampoline” or “Frog Bouncer” during development. Thus, we wound up with the backronym, CRoAK, or Customizable Recorder of Animal Kinesis. We had this work published in HardwareX.