Survival rate on mice... - how about using an infrared webcam to track the exact time of death? (Jun/28/2007 )

Hi,
I have to follow the survival of a couple of mice.

Could I use an infrared webcam to see the exact time of death?. I can follow the mice during the day but I'm reluctant to follow them during the sleep so I was browsing ebay and suddenly I found "infrared webcam"...

Would an infrared webcam work? (I mean, someone here has one and can track something so small as a mouse?)

Best regards,

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But the process of to cool will need some time, so you still not have the exact time (depends how exact it should be, actually I don't know how long it will take to cool to room temp). And a cheap camera has perhaps not enough resolution to differentiate quite small temp differences.

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Wow, thats an impressing experiment, sure requires dedication... How are you monitoring the life/death during the day? Are you sitting there watching them all the time every day?

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Kinda... during the day I check them every half hour, when they are close to see the light at the end of the tunnel or dead, I extract the key organs for histology and/or westerns.

To know which is the aprox. time window, I thought of making a control, simply to kill a mice and see how much it takes the red to disappear in the webcam... I thought about the resolution but I suppose I'll have the webcam pretty close of the mice...

Is somebody checking survival in any other way?

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