How Engineers Hack Cameras to Photograph and Study Sharks and Lions | National Geographic

[Music] [Music] Crittercam was an animal-born imaging device. It's basically a camera plus a bunch of sensors for collecting scientific data as well as point-of-view imagery. This was the first HD Crittercam we actually made. We built that camera in like three months and had to try to put cameras on the great white sharks.

The process to put a camera on a shark is you have one guy throw out a tuna on a rope, and he tries to lure the shark to go past the boat at a certain distance and at a certain speed. Then the other guy uses this thing called a shark pole; it's an apparatus for actually cinching the camera and fin clamp system onto the shark's dorsal fin. The challenge was we had to get the shark to actually go after the tuna because when they do charge after that bait, they close their eyes for a brief instant, and that's the perfect time to put a camera on that.

That charge is actually bigger. I've got this line and the dead tuna head tied to it, but the tuna will fall off the line if you just like pull it over the side of the boat. So I was reaching over to get the tuna, and the shark bit the outboard because I hadn't actually left. So I fell in, and Eric fell where I was. He swam like Michael Phelps; it only took a few seconds for him to get back and cross the distance, but it would seem like an eternity.

I remember you told me right when you got to the boat, you were like, "Oh my, like my torso is above the water." So now that's part. Crittercam is a video tape recorder enclosed in underwater housing, and it allows us to get film from the seals' point of view. It's almost like the seals are our cameramen for the day.

The very, very first Crittercam was in the late 80s to early 90s, and it was of this type of Crittercam. It was an eight millimeter tape. Greg Marshall started the remote imaging department back then at National Geographic, and he put the whole eight millimeter camcorder in this fiberglass waterproof housing that he had made. After that, the remote imaging department at National Geographic started up, and we began to make the cameras smaller.

[Music] [Music] The main thing about putting cameras with animals is just getting the equipment with them for a period of time until they get used to it. So they took, I think, about four or five days with this. After a while, the pride would just kind of occasionally tap on it.

But what's nice about a vehicle like this is that they very quickly realize, "I can't eat it; it's not gonna hurt me. It's really slow; it's basically a rock." So they kind of just give up. You could drive this right up to a sleeping lioness and get a photo of her or cubs, and that's what Nick did with assistance. In the past, it was typically you'd have your big long lines; you'd sit way over there, way away from the animals, and you get that photo, which would give me a great photo, but you could tell you're far away.

Here at National Geographic, we like to put the animals on a pedestal, if you will, making the animal feel big to you, the viewer, which makes them seem important to us. You and so maybe will care a little more about them. [Music] [Music]