Award-winning Film Details Humane Trapping Methods

More importantly, though, it's a movie with a message: how to treat wild animals captured for scientific study in a humane, safe way.

Rosie Koch, Washington University graduate student in the Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and Stan Braude, Ph.D., lecturer in biology in Arts & Sciences have won the 2004 Jack Ward Non-Commercial Film Award from the Animal Behavior Society of America for their short documentary entitled: All the Trappings. The film also was featured at the St. Louis Film Festival. Jane Phillips Conroy, Ph.D., professor of anatomy in the Washington University School of Medicine, narrates the 15-minute film, shot with a Sony miniDV (VX2000).

Braude is a specialist in blind naked mole-rats, natives of the semi-arid region of Africa comprised of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. These tiny (three to four inches long) creatures are, indeed, blind and hairless all their lives and so ugly that they're cute.

Mole-rat as cultural icon

Many American children know about this species because the naked mole-rat, Rufus, is a hero on the Disney cartoon "Kim-possible." Unlike the cartoon, this film tells the equally amazing adventure of studying these animals in the wild.

Discovered just 100 years ago, blind naked mole-rats are eusocial - like bees and termites, for instance, their community revolves around a breeding queen and her workers. Blind naked mole-rats tunnel beneath the soil and live in a network of burrows that can extend for miles long.

Braude has been studying the creatures in Kenya since 1985. He noticed that local Kenyans trapped the animals with a traditional, double-bladed African garden hoe, which killed as many animals as they dug up, also ruining the infrastructure of the habitat.

In 1987, Braude, the only researcher in the world studying blind naked mole-rats in the wild, developed an electronic trap that would avoid the needless killing and destruction.

"It's a very sensitive trap that does minimal disturbance to the underground burrow system," Braude said. "The old way resulted in death or injury to more than half the animals in the habitat. With my system we can capture whole colonies in a short period of time."

The body of the trap is a plastic tube that is the same diameter as the rats' tunnels. A sliding shutter door cuts off the animal's escape, the door releasing when the animal is completely inside the tube. All Braude has to do after the capture is place the animal in a bucket. He'll take data such as length, weight, date captured, and then band the animals before releasing them in their original habitat. The animals can live into their 20s, with the oldest that Braude has studied being 18 years old.

First, find the mound

The first step to capture blind naked mole-rats is to locate a colony presently excavating tunnels. The animals throw excess soil onto the surface, generating mounds that look like erupting volcanoes. Braude and his assistants can capture an entire colony without digging up more than several yards of the tunnels near the surface.

Using his traps, Braude has captured and released more than 9,000 blind naked mole-rats for nearly 20 years. Some of the animals he marked and released in 1986 are alive today.

The film shows Braude and an assistant employing his method, plus another, above-ground one involving shallow, plastic-lined trenches placed beneath walls that force the animals to go left or right and tumble harmlessly into the trenches. Because of these safe practices, Braude has observed evidence of kidnapping and enslavement by colonies of rats. He also has been able to observe dispersal from their original colonies, traveling as far as a mile or so away from their original homes.

Braude made a crude video of his work some years ago, but asked Koch, who has an interest in videography, to make a higher quality one. Koch has just defended her Ph.D. thesis, which focuses on the dispersal of the animals as well as their endocrinology. One of her findings is that trapping the animals doesn't raise the level of corticosterones. High corticosterone levels are an indication of stress. There's no indication that trapping them stresses them in the least.

Koch has just accepted a position with Story House Productions in Berlin, Germany where she will be involved in making science documentaries and she begins there in February, 2005.

"It was a lot of fun to think of ways to create pictures of the trapping process that we go through many times each year," said Koch. "I tried to capture the excitement of catching the first naked mole-rat of a colony, and show how new methods help us learn more and more interesting things about them. It is a great honor to receive the award from the Animal Behavior Society, and the award certainly serves as a big motivation for future projects of this kind."