yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Filming Glow-in-the-Dark Critters | Best Job Ever


less than 1m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music]

Being a wildlife cameraman, it's a whole discovery of technical knowledge. I'm working with Paul Merrick, who is a grantee of the National Geographic Society. Dr. Merrick studies millipedes, and we're headed out to film them in their natural habitat. They actually are quite difficult to find during the day, but at night, they're actually very easy to find.

And this isn't an accident; these millipedes are actually fluorescent, which is what we normally think of as glow-in-the-dark. Their glowing carapace is actually a signal to predators that, "Hey, I'm not good food, don't eat me." The first time I saw one, I did a double take because there isn't supposed to be light on the forest floor in the middle of the night.

It's just a really cool and bizarre phenomenon. In my mind, there was no way to be too close to them, so at times when we were filming, the lens was only an inch or so from the millipedes. One of the cool things about this work is that every assignment has a challenge, and so often, they feel impossible at first.

In this situation, it was learning a lot about spectrums of light and sensitivities of camera sensors, and I had to figure out electrical power for setting up lights in the woods. Basically, you're just trying to solve problems and create solutions to see things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to. When all's going well, all systems go, you just feel like really you're on this Magic Carpet ride through the underworld.

More Articles

View All
Curvature formula, part 4
So, we’ve been talking about curvature, and this means, uh, you’ve got some sort of parametric curve that you might think of as parameterized by a vector-valued function s of t. Curvature is supposed to measure just how much this curve actually curves. So…
Charlie Munger & Warren Buffett: The Dangers of EBITDA
If somebody is, if they think you’re focusing on EBITDA, they may arrange things so that that number looks bigger than it really is. It’s bigger than it really is anyway. I mean, the implication of that number is that it has great meaning. You take teleco…
Witnessing the Great Desert Elephants | Secrets of the Elephants
Somehow these elephants are eking out a living in a landscape that anyone else would think is lifeless. Conservationist Dr. Paula Kahumbu has spent her career studying the elephants of Africa’s lush savanna grasslands. But she’s never laid eyes on a deser…
Most Startups Are Undercharging - Dalton Caldwell
Most of the time, people are way undercharging for their product. For some reason, there are ideas out there that you should either not charge for your product or you charge such a tiny fraction of what you could be charging that you’re not set up for suc…
Michael Burry's HUGE New Bet on ONE STOCK
[Music] Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! In this video, we are going to be looking at another famous investor’s Q2 2020 13F filing. Of course, the 13Fs have just been dominating the news over the past couple of weeks; they’ve all come out at once. S…
Warren Buffett's Most Iconic Lecture EVER (MUST WATCH)
You would be better off if when you got out of school here, you got a punch card with 20 punches on it. Every big financial decision you made, you used up a punch. You’d get very rich because you’d think through very hard each one. If you went to a cockta…