Watch this video to learn how biologists like Victor Ortega Jiménez use high-speed cameras to record fascinating slow motion footage of animals in the wild.
For millennia, humans have observed and have been inspired by the ways that animals move. Some researchers theorize that paintings in famous caves like Chauvet and Lascaux, made more than 30,000 years ago, were designed to show the ways a horse might bend its neck or a bison might run with the aid of a flickering torch.
Today, biologists like Victor Ortega Jiménez can fire up a high-speed camera and record thousands of frames per second of fascinating animal motion from creatures like hummingbirds, water-strider insects and flamingos. The footage allows them to parse rapid movements that would otherwise be impossible to observe with the naked eye.
As Ortega Jiménez explains in this 101 in 101 video, the study of animal dynamics is the study of the beautiful dance of forces between animal limbs, muscles and wings and environmental challenges, whether that’s pounding rain or the delicate surface tension of a pond’s water.