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Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater
- notum 4y agoAbsolutely spectacular. The diversity of marine life is nothing short of astounding. More deep sea missions!
- pvaldes 4y agoOh, you had not even see the best parts.
- CommitSyn 4y ago> These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter. Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. It’s hard to avoid these relatives of shrimp and lobster—Walter has studied them all over the world, in the Red Sea as well as Antarctica. Wherever there’s water, copepods thrive. I'm wondering how this was handled in the end. Do Orthodox Jews drink the tap in NYC today?
- oboes 4y agoAn article about that question: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-but-is-it-kosher.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-...
- aliqot 4y agoI guess nobody's going to mention the elephant in the room, so I'll take the hit. Where the hell am I supposed to find tiny kosher cocktail sauces?
- alistairSH 4y agoGuidance from rabbis varies (no central source of authority in Judaism). Some orthodox rabbis will view the copepods as not kosher and suggest filtering the water. Less orthodox rabbis will say the water is fine because the copepods are not visible to the naked eye.
- mc32 4y agoThat frees the vision impaired a bit relative to people with good eyesight from a few things!
- raphael_l 4y agoDoes that mean blind jews can use this as precedent to eat whatever they like?
- mc32 4y agoLooks like some rabbis might allow some liberal interpretation so I guess the answer is it depends… Flexibility is good.
- TchoBeer 4y agoNo, that would be silly. "The Naked Eye" is what normal human eyes can see without aid. There is a lot of grey area there, but microscopic creatures that you can only see with specialized equipment invented in the past 100 years certainly are not visable to the naked eye for any reasonable definition of naked eye.
- aliqot 4y agoWithin reason, it's nothing, or `betal bshishim` which is equated to one sixtieth. It's void, as a concept, in Hebrew tradition. It helps if you think about it in terms of historical hardships of the Hebrews. It means if you're hungry and your neighbor cooks for you and there's a tiny bit of non-kosher fat in the soup or something like that, or if you're starving, Yahweh will forgive you because it's such a small amount and you're so hungry it's not right to penalize you for that which you couldn't control. Something that is one sixtieth is colloquially so insignificant that it equates to nil.
- TchoBeer 4y agoThe short answer is yes, except a tiny minority who require a filter that can filter the tiny guys. But it's a whole discourse.
- jebarker 4y ago> But copepods typically range from about 0.2 to 1.7 millimeters in length, just large enough to magnify using conventional lenses and equipment Does that mean conventional macro camera lenses or a microscope?
- gaudat 4y agoMacro photography most likely. Microscope images tend not to have bokehs like the ones in the article. You can use flourescent microscopy to make those glow in the dark images but the field of view is about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude too small for this.
- dekhn 4y agoat such low magnification, the depth of field (not field of view) is pretty big, you can usually see significant out-of-focus detail. But normally people just put the sample in a well and cover it with a coverslip, which makes a thin section.
- 0898 4y agoThis line puzzled me. Surely, if each drop of seawater was filled with 1mm length creatures you'd notice?
- vaidhy 4y agoNot every creature is 1mm.
- zokier 4y agoIt's not inconceivable that a conventional camera could work here, although it is borderline. Quick napkin math: Sony A7RV produces 9504x6336 pixel images from 35.7x23.8mm sensor, resulting roughly 266 pixels/mm. With a 2x macro lens (Laowa has some), it would mean that 0.2mm subject would be 266x0.2x2=106 pixels across. Not exactly HD, but possibly still usable.
- antongribok 4y agoIf we're talking simple math on magnification: It's very easy to find macro lenses that have 5:1 magnification, meaning that an object is projected onto the sensor 5x it's size. Taking 1.7 mm and projecting that onto a Canon R5 45 MP sensor with 5x magnification gives us something that would be around 1934 pixels in length (just under 1/4th the width of the sensor that is 8192 effective pixels wide). I think you can convert 5x into 10x or 15x pretty easily without much loss in image quality. That's not the problem, the problem is getting enough light (without boiling your specimen, which they briefly mention) and nailing the focus. At such magnification, both problems are challenging.
- oboes 4y agoIf you like those pictures, you will probably also like this music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPu-qPIwJcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPu-qPIwJcI
- jonathanoliver 4y agoI probably shouldn't mention how much seawater I accidentally swallow whenever I'm in the ocean swimming.
- hutzlibu 4y agoMaybe you missed the following, important part: "These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter. Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes"
- olddustytrail 4y agoFull of nourishing copepods!
- bennyelv 4y agoI wonder that the commercial model is for endeavours such as this? I guess you collect royalties from people who want to publish the photos, but although you get a one-off wow factor I don't see there being a big market for these kinds of photos. Is it a hobby/pursuit or can you actually make a living doing this kind of thing? P.S. It's a fascinating thing and I love it!
- vaidhy 4y agoI have the same question over nature and wildlife photography. Maybe there is a royalty model when people license the images or publishing coffee table books. This is like open source work. You do it for the passion and maybe someone will give you enough contracts for a living.
- bennyelv 4y agoIt could well be a career for "people of means" only, I'd be fascinated if anyone here had any insight into this...
- pier25 4y agoMany photographers make a living with magazines like NatGeo. And you could also sell prints online.
- vaidhy 4y agoYou can win a project from NatGeo and/or other organizations.. but that is not permanent income.
- pier25 4y agoWell almost nothing creative does, unfortunately.
- munificent 4y agoLots and lots of people get by with unstable burst-y incomes like this. Those of us with well-paid salaried jobs have a luxury we easily take for granted.
- thehours 4y agoI clicked expecting it was going to be about tiny cameras taking pictures from within droplets. Stunning photos nonetheless!
- 0daym 4y agotoo easy for the almighty
- vaidhy 4y agotoo easy - so not done by god? this statement confuses me.
- mvindahl 4y agoWhen I was a young kid in the early 1980s, my grandpa had a large book about Darwin's voyages and the Theory of Evolution. The book probably dated from the 1950s or 1960s and contained countless photos of fascinating creatures, reproduced with all the printing technology of the era. Whenever we visited him, I would flip through the book and marvel at the creativity of nature. These photos made me feel a little bit in the same way.
- hammock 4y agoCool photos, but this makes me not want to drink tap water
- lm28469 4y agoWait until you learn about what's in your intestines/stomach or on your skin...
- kmfrk 4y agoTime to drop the referral code for a Brita filter.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoFree protein with every glass!
- hawski 4y agoWait a moment and think about how you are made of meat. https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
- lm28469 4y agoThere even is a spooky skeleton inside of each of us :|
- irrational 4y agoSometimes I look over at my wife sleeping in our bed and think about how I am sleeping next to a skeleton.
- username135 4y agoWe're all just sacks of flesh
- dekhn 4y agofleshy bags of mostly water
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI wish there were a way to "productize" this, or automate it at least. I'm imagining some sort of aquarium-like tank you stock with ocean water that is able to maintain the microscopic life, allow them to flourish. Meanwhile, some sort of slow or periodic pump draws aquarium water into an attached, miniature "photography studio" where an appropriate camera+lens feeds a constant live stream to a display or to the web or to a Bond-villain's giant projector in their lair. What a wonderful "screensaver" to have when the occasional appearance of a micro organism graces your screen. Perhaps too there are as-yet undiscovered species we might find with such a device?
- intrasight 4y agoMy daughter, 18 at the time, "productized" this for me - by buying me for Christmas a cheap digital microscope. We looked around the house for something to look at, and decided to try a drop of water from our aquarium.
- jpm_sd 4y agoIt's been done! Very niche market however. This is a tow-sled system for deployment from a research vessel. https://www.planktonimaging.com/ https://www.planktonimaging.com/
- nwellinghoff 4y agoWe do this in the salt water aquarium hobby. It is not easy and requires a lot of equipment to keep the food chain flowing. 1. You have to grow a phytoplankton culture (the base of the food chain) https://melevsreef.com/articles/10-step-phytoplankton-culture https://melevsreef.com/articles/10-step-phytoplankton-cultur... 2. Then you have to map out to the zooplankton culture chain you want to grow. Usually in the aquarium trade the target are foods that larval fish will eat etc. There are only a few types commercially available. So you would never see the diversity you are seeing in the article. Conclusion, you can only do it with fresh sea water from the ocean. I would recommend taking a sample from 0 to 10ft on a reef during a full moon or where there is a lot of light. You will see much variety!
- acomjean 4y agoI think it can be done. Automated liquid handling and microscopes do exist. We had a confocal microscope in our lab with a robotic arm attached and can automatically image samples. I'm not of the details but the samples are big compared to its field of view so I believe it searches for images with cells before imaging. A lot of experiments are done on these plates with liquid wells. This isn't our model but shows a larger scope with automated robotic arm and a "plate hotel": https://confocal.ccr.cancer.gov/nci-microscopy-core-labs/bethesda/nci-hitif/instrumentation/ https://confocal.ccr.cancer.gov/nci-microscopy-core-labs/bet... I'd go into why we switched from PerkinElmer and their proprietary image format to a GE but thats outside the scope.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoThose are beautiful photographs. Makes you wonder if we'll find similar things on Europa if we stuck in a pipette.
- dekhn 4y agoor the ice caps of mars.
- alejo1000 4y agoReminds me of this old flash game called Flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(video_game)
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoWhich was later released on consoles, then the company made games like Flower, Journey and Sky (free on mobile platforms). If you're not into gaming, I'd recommend setting a few hours aside to go through Journey at least.
- tillinghast 4y agoCame here to say this exact same thing. It had a beautiful soundtrack, too. https://austinwintory.bandcamp.com/album/flow https://austinwintory.bandcamp.com/album/flow
- shellfishgene 4y agoJust tried to find out where to buy it for PC, but could not. This page https://thatgamecompany.com/flow/ https://thatgamecompany.com/flow/ has a little PC icon next to the OS ones, but maybe that version doesn't actually exist.
- jaredstein 4y agoWhat a great photograph. It is interesting how much life can exist within a single drop of water.
- sbt567 4y agoThe "When The World Become Small" video[0] by zefrank is an amazing way to see the 'live' version of it (though by different artist). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTLNXdG-sG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTLNXdG-sG4
- dr_dshiv 4y agoRobert Hooke’s “Micrographia” had a really profound effect on the history of science. Here is the book— check out the letter to the king. I think people’s minds were blown and were ready to accept some new realities. https://www.milestone-books.de/pages/books/003613/robert-hooke/micrographia-or-some-physiological-descriptions-of-minute-bodies-made-by-magnifying-glasses https://www.milestone-books.de/pages/books/003613/robert-hoo...
- nerdponx 4y agoThat letter is really something. I tend to think of grandiose flattery towards royalty as something that belongs in the ancient world. The puns on "small" and "least" at the end were also unexpectedly funny. I wonder how much people took this kind of flattery seriously, or if it was done with eyes rolled and tongue in cheek.
- yamtaddle 4y ago> I wonder how much people took this kind of flattery seriously, or if it was done with eyes rolled and tongue in cheek. Probably everyone who wasn't an idiot knew it was kinda silly and the sentiments not genuine, or at least exaggerated, but did it anyway. Cf business English, résumé cover letters, et c.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoKeep in mind that this letter and book helped guarantee funding for the Royal Society! Edit: The text “…Philosophy and Experimental Learning have prosper'd under your Royal Patronage. And as the calm prosperity of your Reign has given us the leisure to follow these Studies of quiet and retirement, so it is just, that the Fruits of them should, by way of acknowledgement, be return'd to your Majesty. There are, Sir, several other of your Subjects, of your Royal Society, now busie about Nobler matters: The Improvement of Manufactures and Agriculture, the Increase of Commerce, the Advantage of Navigation: In all which they are assisted by your Majesties Incouragement and Example. Amidst all those greater Designs, I here presume to bring in that which is more proportionable to the smalness of my Abilities, and to offer some of the least of all visible things, to that Mighty King, that has establisht an Empire over the best of all Invisible things of this World, the Minds of Men.“
- m3kw9 4y agoJust imagine, you could have been born as one of quadrillion of these guys, but instead you are a human, that’s more than lottery luck we all got, if you can read this.
- uptown 4y agoOr maybe it's all still just a matter of perspective: https://youtu.be/zyuYiehl2DM?t=173 https://youtu.be/zyuYiehl2DM?t=173
- manbash 4y ago"you could have been born as" and the so-called "life-lottery" are a matter of philosophical and belief-system debate. The "you" (or: self) is a concept, a perception. I am just me, and couldn't have been something else, or born in another timeline, or to different parents.
- icambron 4y agoTo elaborate this point a bit: the "lottery" concept requires you to believe there's like a queue of souls and they each get allocated to different bodies, and you're lucky you got a fancy one instead of a microscopic shrimp. A different -- and to me, more plausible -- way to look at it is that "you" are an emergent property of a specific complex organism. How you actually emerge is a fascinating and difficult discussion, but putting aside the mechanics, the implication of this framing is that "you could have been a microscopic shrimp" is meaningless, like asking "what if that cloud were instead a bowl of soup?"
- enw 4y agoWhat would be the “me” if I were to clone myself 1:1? Would there be two “me”s? Or a the same old “me”, a single consciousness but two bodies?
- siwatanejo 4y agoTwo consciousnesses with the same origin. What's wrong with that?
- dylan604 4y agoThese pics remind me of an indy game way back on the PS3 called Flow[0]. It was designed as a low stress, low impact, and a fairly calming game. You were a small underwater creature that swam around collecting things to become a bigger creature. You used the 3-axis feature of the controller instead of the d-pad and joysticks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(video_game)
- rodface 4y agoI fondly remember and adored that game. It would be great to see an updated release of the Flash version https://www.crazygames.com/game/flow https://www.crazygames.com/game/flow
- bondarchuk 4y agoThere was also a very nice PSP version which I'm sure you'll be able to emulate on PC easily (no idea what's the state of PS3 emu).
- bmitc 4y agoIf anyone is interested, thatgamecompany [sic], the studio who made Flow, also made Flower and Journey. Both are amazing and touching. I haven't played their new game Sky. https://thatgamecompany.com/ https://thatgamecompany.com/
- fdgdd 4y agoReminded me of Osmos: https://www.osmos-game.com/ https://www.osmos-game.com/
- trumbitta2 4y agoDo you think copepods know humans exist? What about us knowing higher creatures exist, and we inhabit a droplet in their oceans?
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoMost humans believe in higher creatures of some sort. I am unwilling to bet one way or the other on it.
- irrational 4y agoPut down the bong dude.
- tamaharbor 4y agoI think that was a Twilight Zone episode?
- Aaronstotle 4y agoDuring finals week in my undergrad at Berkeley, I remember seeing the squirrels and thought, "How nice it must be to be a squirrel and not worry about human affairs." My next thought was, "What looks at Humans in similar fashion?"
- pvaldes 4y agoNot --fortunately--. They didn't noticed us. Trust me. Some rooms in this group are top class nightmare fuel.
- daveslash 4y agoMy wife and I get into the ocean pretty often -- sometimes, every day. But when I leave my swimming attire hanging in the bathroom for more than a couple of days (I try not to do that, but sometimes forget), it starts to smell really fishy. My wife asks why it smells so bad after 2 days, but not immediately after getting out of the ocean. I tell her The ocean is a soup of life, and when you get out there are millions of living critters in the fabric -- it's all alive. After 2 days... not so much
- emblaegh 4y agoI assume the stink come from chemicals excreted by other living things eating the dead ones. So the stink is not a sign that your trunks are less full of life, just that it got new tenants.
- anamexis 4y agoSeems like a technicality. By that logic, all stinky things are caused by living things instead of dead things.
- gmiller123456 4y agoMaybe not ALL stinky things. But apparently humans evolved to be sensitive to, and repulsed by the the secretions of some bacteria, because the ones who weren't died pretty early.
- avierax 4y agoYeah, that was also a very early thing to evolve. So much that the ones that evolved it hardly could be called humans at all.
- bee_rider 4y agoDespite the smells, there are few bodies of water that I’d rather swim in than cold oceans, as far as nasty little germs and whatnot go.
- 4y ago
- bmitc 4y agoBeautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what it means to be alive on Earth. Religions seems incapable of fitting their model over the apparent continuum of life. It was also somewhat humorous to read this.
- prpl 4y agoWithout going into religion, it’s also mildly interesting for the defining veganism.
- angst_ridden 4y agoI've been in discussions with vegans over the 9.1x10^2 to 1.3x10^8 bacteria in the average indoor m^3 of air.
- prpl 4y agosure, but a copepod is a lot closer to a shrimp than bacteria.
- echelon 4y agoOr the bacteria and fungi constantly living and dying within us. The self cells we continually turn over and instruct to die. The second order predation that balances the ecosystem that sustains us. Orcas that enjoy playing with their food. Lions that eat prey alive. Beautiful and terrifying. Our primate and hominid ancestors that ate the flesh of rival clans. I respect veganism and personal choices, but the world is a big place with lots going on that will forever escape our ability to control. That's how I frame my own decision, but I respect others' too.
- TchoBeer 4y ago
- dukeofdoom 4y agoneeds a youtube video of his setup
- toephu2 4y agoAre there or were there ever copepods on Mars?
- pvaldes 4y agoNope. Life is exclusive from earth at this moment. No fossils or live animals, fungi or plants of any kind in Mars. But if there is still some subterranean water at the correct temperature in a deep Mars cave... who knows? They can stand huge pressures and extreme environments very well.
- zokier 4y agoWe have not found any evidence of life of any sort on Mars, much less of multi-cellular life. I imagine that even the most optimistic pan-spermic ideas would involve far more primitive/rugged life-forms than crustaceans.
- temp0826 4y agoIn a handful of ocean water You could not count all the finely tuned Musicians -Hafiz
- eevilspock 4y agoMakes me wonder about the impact of microplastics on microlife. It's a good thing their not intelligent otherwise they'd be pissed.
- moffkalast 4y ago> "Copepods are the most numerous animal on the planet," says Chad Just narrowly coming ahead of the Seethepods.
- diimdeep 4y agoThere is amazing video version of this, Journey to the Microcosmos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS2mdmt4JPw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS2mdmt4JPw
- insanitybit 4y agoThese videos are so great and chill
- Waterluvian 4y agoMaybe I missed this in the article. How many single drops of water have life in them? Like what’s the hit rate?
- pvaldes 4y agoThe animals are captured one by one and placed carefully into a drop of water for viewing in an (inverted?) microscope. Is not a random sampling. You can spot all of those animals with the naked eye.
- zokier 4y agoIf you count bacteria etc single-cell organisms, then I'd assume close to 100% naturally occurring water has some amount of life in it.
- pookah 4y agoOcean water is lively. A single drop has something like ten million viruses. https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2011/013097/decade-long-study-reveals-recurring-patterns-viruses-open-ocean https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2011/013097/decade-long-study-reve... But in the article the photographer said he'd come up empty on some of the dives. So it's fairly spread out.
- photochemsyn 4y agoIf you want to go down another order of magnitude or few, fluorescent microscopy of single-celled organisms is pretty interesting. This collection of images is stunning: https://www.canadiannaturephotographer.com/epifluorescencemicroscopy.html https://www.canadiannaturephotographer.com/epifluorescencemi... These techniques also revealed the sheer scale of microbial life, as even the clearest ocean water from the most remote, nutrient-limited tropical seas will contain as many as 100,000 cells per mL. Below that there are the various viruses that infect or cohabit with these bacteria and small plants and animals, which are invisible to light microscopy.
- mncharity 4y ago> the sheer scale of microbial life [...] ocean water There's also the sheer predation of it. IIRC, for some coastal surface biome I've long forgotten, viral half-life was like an hour, and a third of bacteria were virally lysed each day. A cup of beach water is not just teaming with life, it's a war zone.
- bluenose69 4y agoAt https://www.whoi.edu/what-we-do/explore/instruments/instruments-sensors-samplers/video-plankton-recorder-vpr/ https://www.whoi.edu/what-we-do/explore/instruments/instrume... you can read about the VPR (video plankton recorder), which is towed behind a ship and takes photos of a small region. It's a great tool for seeing patterns of different species. The videos at the bottom of the site might be interested to folks reading this thread.
- t3estabc 4y ago[dead]
- cromwellian 4y agoCopepods are pretty much everywhere, do you need some copium to cope with that? Sorry I couldn't resist.
- freetime2 4y agoThis article reminds me that I’ve been meaning to buy a microscope to play around with. Any suggestions for an affordable, beginner-friendly microscope setup?
- jiggawatts 4y agoMy experience is USB digital microscopes are much better because you can look at the picture on a big screen. The eyepieces of most cheap microscopes are terrible in comparison. With a screen you can show the kids what’s going on. It’s a shared experience.
- asicsp 4y agohttps://foldscope.com/ https://foldscope.com/ >Foldscope combines low-cost materials with precision optics to create inexpensive microscopes that are affordable for communities worldwide. With a magnification of 140X, Foldscope can visualize tiny things like bacteria and microorganisms as well as larger samples like insects, plants, fabrics, and tissues. Foldscope can also attach to mobile phones for imaging. This portable microscope is also waterproof. With that versatility, the possibilities are endless! Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32864413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32864413
- freetime2 4y agoVery cool! I would definitely order, but unfortunately shipping to my country costs twice as much as the actual microscope.
- maartenh 4y agoIf you ever visit Amsterdam for some time, and like to visit musea, check out Micropia [0]. It is a museam where they exhibit microbes, that you can explore using microscopes. [0] https://www.micropia.nl/en/ https://www.micropia.nl/en/
- dekhn 4y agoWhen I was a kid, my school took us the boston science museum and I wandered off to the microscope exhibit. The museum collected and displayed a bunch of things from Boston Bay, and looking in- as a kid learning about computers- it seemed like some of the "animacules" behaved in complex ways- like a computer program with sensor input and mechanical actuators. Some would spiral endlessly while others would zip forward, then back, then turn and zip forward again. I decided then and there I would figure out how these things worked, applying my hacker knowledge of computers. That led to a career in biology although I don't think I really used microscopes much at all over the next 30 years. Recently I adjusted my hobbies and built a microscope from components and use it to apply object detection to tardigrades. Guess what- the state of the art is to collect enormous numbers of images of a microbiotic organism and cluster them into a small number of states (like a markov model) and estimate the transitions between them. I don't even want to solve any specific problem- I just love watching tardigrades. They're hilarious little animacules.
- oh_sigh 4y agoDid you write up any details about your microscope build? Or could you provide a good launching point for that?
- dekhn 4y agoNo, I haven't, because I don't want to support users with something I'm teaching myself with (it changes quickly as I learn that I did something wrong). In short, I use aluminum extrusion on optical breadboard to build a rigid frame and then mount linear stages based on stepper motors, smooth rods and 3d printed bearings and mounts. This forms a 3-axis stage to move the sample (could be a slide, or a dish, or whatever) which I control using FluidNC (normally intended for CNC) and some hand-written Python scripts for the UI/camera interfacing. It uses industrial vision cameras. Most components are fairly inexpensive- at least compared to scientific systems- but aren't cheap for a typical hobbyist. The breadboard is >$200, the extrusion is another $100, the cameras at least $250, and my total personal time investment (converted to salary dollars) would be ludicrous. The important advantage of my design is that I control the closed loop camera/motor control stack (with machine learning inline), and I can raster scan to make large field of view stitches with the camera moving constantly and super-short light exposures. Here's an example video tracking a tardigrade (keeping its snout as close to the center as possible) I made with the previous generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaMFDjC1DQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaMFDjC1DQ
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sam_goody 4y agoCopepod females do not need to mate to reproduce. So one of the most abundant life forms on the planet has a trick to keep their edge. One wonders why they need it.
- brap 4y agoI wonder if these little things have any form of what we consider “thought”.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoThis title is about as close to a lie as you can get without being a lie. "Meticulously staged photos capture highly selectively curate life presented through bespoke drops of seawater". Cool? Absolutely! Accurate title? Hell no.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- floppydiskette 4y agoIt’s literally life - a living thing - inside a drop of water. What is the problem here? The title doesn’t imply anything about how curated it is or isn’t.
- pvaldes 4y agoJust to be pedantic. The title is equivalent to: "Photos capture tigers, elephants and giraffes that live in the broom room" The "drop of seawater" is just a literary construction here. This animals don't live "in a drop of seawater", they live in the ocean. They are superfast also for animals so small. I had photographed some of them and you need to apply a restrain of some type to be able to take a clear photo. They are extremely migratory animals. Even more active than birds probably, if we take in mind their relative size.
- chinabot 4y agoI'm Never going swimming again.
- ajsnigrutin 4y agoIf you have access to 'dirty water' (like a puddle of muddy water from a dirty area... or seawater) and a laser pointer, you can make a DIY microscope at home and see the stuff inside yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYEuo3j2Ly0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYEuo3j2Ly0 (not a "real" microscope, but more like something for the kids to try out and see actually living, moving microorganisms projected on the wall)
- dado3212 4y agoAre these photos in true color? What do the RAWs look like? I can't tell if the coloring is real, or if it's more along the lines of astrophotography where the colors are fake, but illuminate something key about the photo (in this case, body structure).