Dr. Adrian Smith, head of the Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University, is back again with another incredible slow-motion video showcasing the movement of insects at incredibly slow speeds.
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Dr. Smith has already shown off springtails jumping at 73,000 frames per second (fps), but this time his subject matter is moths. For his latest video, Dr. Smith captured seven different species of moth taking flight at 6,000 fps, making it the only video of its kind, according to Dr. Smith.
The footage was captured on a Phantom VEO 1310 through a Laowa 60mm f/2.8 2X Ultra-Macro Lens. High-speed LED lighting from Visual Instrumentation Corporation was used to light the scene.
Alongside the mesmerizing slow-motion footage of the moths, Dr. Smith narrates facts about each species and details some the unique features that distinguishes them from the more than 160,000 species of the mostly-nocturnal insects. Below are the seven species of moth shown in the video, in order of their appearance:
Dr. Smith says all seven of the moths shown in the video were captured in Cornish, New Hampshire, United States between July 12 - 16 and released upon completion of filming.
To see more incredible high-speed videos from Dr. Smith and his team, visit the Ant LabYouTube channel. You can also follow Dr. Adrian Smith on Twitter and Instagram.
Moths are fluffy for a couple of reasons: one, being nocturnal, they can lose body heat at a faster rate - the fluff provides insulation. Second, many moths lack mouth parts for feeding and live off their fat reserves (collected as caterpillars) before they run out of calories and die. They must breed before they starve to pass on their genes. Having fluff as insulation increases their odds of passing on their genes because less fat is burned to maintain body temperature. So natural selection has favored fluffy bodies for moths.
Watching these makes me think that going vertical with their bodies immediately after takeoff costs them energy in the form of reduced lift. It would be great to see some videos showing airflow patterns.
This was amazing to watch and amazingly well done. But then imagine 5 years from now when Phantom has developed real time eye detection autofocus .... ;-)
Stunning moving images, excellent presented. It is like discovering another dimension of our world. Technology really does enable scientists and creative people to make discoveries for us all to take part of.
You have not seen the more amazing part yet. I worked with a scanning electron microscope that took a section view of the joint on the leg of a common ant. As a lead design engineer, I say it was the most intricate amazing piece of design I have seen. I call it frightfully amazing. From a practical design point of view, I don't envision how you can natural select out a design like that for too many reasons. I just envision trillions upon trillions of moths with unworkable leg joints, eyes, wings rolling around trying to natural select themselves out. Or do you perfect the leg first, then the eye. Or you just step back and say this is not going to work.
Evolution isn’t like a designer sitting down at a drawing board. It’s about incremental changes over millennia with a whole lot of failed experiments. You looked at the joint of a single species. If you looked at the joints of many other species, you would see variation…. Some more complex so-called designs and some less… that’s the key. Evolution doesn’t happen overnight… a design doesn’t just suddenly appear
Take aircraft landing gear for example similar to this. Once the concept is close to the final shape, then you can adjust the links to perfect the operation. That part, evolution can help. For the concept itself, you really need a big picture vision of the final product, and work backward. Even a tiny bit of vision of the end product will help tremendously. But working blind at the piece part level randomly drawing lines and curves, in a practical world, you just won't get there. You can throw in several million years, but is still a big question how a design is going to come to shape.
wombat661: Again, you're assuming that ants evolved their joints in a vacuum. They did not. They evolved from a specialized family of ground-dwelling wasps, who were descendants of a family of extinct moths that are also common ancestors to bees, and those in turn evolved from common ancestors of wasps and sawflies. And so on. While the ant joint may be complex, those of their extinct ancestors were not. The ant joint is complex because it serves a specialized purpose - rapid movement on the ground. Those of flying insects are less specialized. Your mistake has been thinking that such complexity cannot happen on its own, so there must be a creator ... but you need to look at the anatomies of their extinct ancestral families that were less specialized.
faunagraphy: Going from simple to complex design is way more involved than these hypothesis assume. Is like going from a matchbox car to a pedal car to a go kart to a Honda Civic to a F1 racecar. They all have 4 wheels and does the same function. Each is a quantum leap. Take Honda Civic to F1. They both have engines and wheel. You know it takes an incredible amount of brain power to design a F1 car. You can use random mutation and natural selection to do design, but it needs to be a carefully constrained process with a goal in mind, and not complete random lines on a CAD tube. Why? Because the number of possibility with random lines is infinite. Is like finding a needle in the Milky Way. Even the universe don't have enough time for that!
wombat: you are making a flawed assumption that there are "lower" animals (like insects) and "higher" animals (like us). That is not the case. Present-day insects, present-day humans, and of course, other present-day primates, are all modern animals. So no, humans did not evolve from insects or octopi or fish or monkeys. However, humans and monkeys have common ancestors. Humans and fish also have common ancestors. But our shared ancestors with primates were more recent than shared ancestors with fish, or modern-day insects, or modern-day bacteria.
Take eyes for instance. The eyes of humans, moths and octopuses have very different structures. Human eyes aren't more "advanced" than moth or octopus eyes - just different. You can't make Ferraris from Honda Civics, but present-day Ferraris are due to numerous minor improvements over previous versions of Ferraris. Difference is that natural pressures drive these changes in organisms.
The evolutionary tree is not the issue. Even DNA analysis validates the animal tree. The problem is with the specific hypothesis of random mutation and natural selection. Take any design with incremental improvement. A camera improvement like Nikon Z7 to Z9. You cannot randomly put transistors on the chip to improve autofocus speed. That is just not how design work. You see Nikon introduce the Z9, but there is a huge team of engineers working on that for countless hours coordinating with suppliers to make the incremental change. It didn’t randomly mutate, and some engineer select the one that works. If you change the hypothesis to random turning on and off of genes, and natural selection, then is more probable. The genes are already there. The system engineering and analysis were already done with the full concept of an eye. The natural selection is just turning on the eye gene, and fine tuning the size of the ball. That is conceivable.
You're taking an engineering process (designing a Z9) and believing that biology functions the same way. In nature, random events lead to specific outcomes even for non-living things. Rainfall creates pools of water that will dissolve soft substances and find a path, until pressure from seasonal variations (natural selection) either causes it to go underground, dry up seasonally, form a salt lake or reach the ocean. The world over, we get rivers, oxbow lakes, silt, flooding. Everywhere, rocks are eroded in similar shapes by flowing water. We never see saltwater rivers, angular path of flow, star-shaped lakes instead of oxbows, aberrations in rock strata. These are specific outcomes caused by random inputs. These events also occur on other planetary bodies - Earth-like rivers and lakes made of other liquids.
If evolution weren't real, antibiotics wouldn't work and we'd never see new diseases. We can even create DNA in labs or new wild species by isolating existing populations!
"Technically we're the aliens, they were here long before we did." Technically, no. We do not come from another planet. We, and these moths, certainly have a common ancestor, should it be a bacteria. So we are cousins. In fact, all living species are cousins.
And they were here 300 million years ago, spread across the world, enduring mass extinctions and tectonic shifts before any semblence of hominids even begun to appear. Also not into creationist crap.
Djehuty, Well, we are not all cousins. There is an exception. Creationists are not my cousins, even less my brothers and sisters. They are just an error... ;-)
My guess is since it's only 1080p, diffraction won't be a limiting factor when stopping way down to f/32 or beyond. I doubt he has a 4k file when it's at 6000 fps so?
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