Brushtail Possum Enjoying a Cheeky Placebo Treat

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Credit:

Prithul Chaturvedi, Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania, Australia

Shortlisted, Large Animal Category, The Research Animal Photography Awards, Oceania 2026

 

A common brushtail possum enjoying a cheeky placebo treat in our novel remote animal microchip scanner (RAMS) developed for target specific animal vaccination and supplemental feeding.

We setup RAMS in a Tasmanian Devil enclosure, expecting a few placebo baits to be dispensed and taken up by Arthur, the captive resident. However, one bait was falsely dispensed during daytime that did not pique the devil’s interest. We were surprised to see a wild possum drawn to the system and enjoying the placebo bait when Arthur must be sleeping after a busy day of being cute.

RAMS uses a simple image classification model to recognise a devil and dispense a bait. It can also recognise tagged individuals by reading their microchip. The onboard species recognition model can be updated for any target species, making it a general ecological tool.