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Right now, my days are mainly spent at a computer or in Zoom meetings. When I did get to go into the field for my PhD pre-COVID, it was a lot different. A field day was usually waking up early, getting all the cameras together. I would have them in my room from downloading and transferring videos taken the day before, plus charging all the batteries. We would have a quick breakfast and then load all the equipment into our boat. We’d go through our checklist to make sure nothing was missing (gear, lunches, fuel, water, cameras, etc.). Then we turn on the GPS and head to the location we finished at the previous day.

This project involved setting cameras with bait in front of them so on the boat ride, we would start preparing the bait by mushing it and putting it in our bait bags. Once we got to our first site, we would tie ropes to our cameras, make sure they were filming and deploy them. One person would drop the camera and one would write down the data. We repeated this for 6 cameras and then waited until they had been down for an hour. Then we picked all the cameras up and got ready to put them back down with fresh bait. We repeated that another one or two times so we set 18 or 24 cameras in a single day (with a battery change or two in the middle) and then headed home. During our waits for the cameras we would go snorkelling, listen to music and chat, or have lunch.

Once back on land, all the equipment was rinsed off from the salt water and brought back to the shed we kept it in. I would go back to my room and start downloading and labelling the video footage. This often took hours. Once all the videos were downloaded, I made multiple copies on multiple hard drives to make sure we didn’t lose anything. All the cameras and spare batteries were put on charge and we would have a quick dinner and discuss the plan for the next day.