Hey everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here with Just the Zoo of Us. This is your favorite

animal review podcast. And this is a really exciting day for me because I get to talk to somebody

really, really cool about a really cool animal. This is Dr. Asia Murphy. Say hi, Asia.

Hey, guys. I'm so glad to have you here with us. I will admit, I followed you on Twitter for a while. And I think you're really cool. And the animal that you study is really cool, too. This is the fusa. And before we talk about the fusa, let's talk about you for a minute. So how did you get into the work that you do? So I basically got just really lucky. I had a dad who was interested in wildlife stuff, and so he would take me camping and hiking.

And then I was lucky enough to get into a college that had a program for studying wildlife species.

And I was lucky enough to get into a research program that sort of gave me this background

that allowed me to go further into my career as a master's and a PhD student.

And you study ecology, right?

Yeah.

That's awesome.

What is your work look like?

I know from following you on Twitter that you do a lot of work looking at camera traps.

So what does that work look like for you?

So just in case, you know, the audience doesn't know what camera traps are.

They're basically just trail cameras you can get at Walmart or I think Dick's sporting goods probably has it.

They're automatic cameras that are usually in a box.

You strap them onto a tree or a pole.

And when the animal walks in front of it, it breaks an invisible beam and it takes a picture or a video.

So it depends.

It actually depends on whether we're putting out cameras and we're doing field work or whether I'm analyzing the data.

So when we're doing field work, I'm mostly in the field, in the forest.

When I was doing my work in Madagascar, I camped out in the rainforest for a couple weeks at a time.

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