Entomologists from the San Diego Natural History Museum perform a rough sort of insect species collected in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve during the 2010 BioBlitz, May 22, 2010.

A few times a year the planets align and someone pays me to write something. This time around it was for BioBlitz 2010 at Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, organized by the San Diego Natural History Museum. You can see photos from this year’s BioBlitz with my Del Mar Times article.

The BioBlitz is a pretty cool deal. Not only does it highlight the biodiversity we take for granted, it’s basically a scientist open house. Kids can walk up to working scientists and ask them pretty much anything. For me scientists are essentially rock stars so I always like a chance to hang out with them.

Here’s a bonus video clip I shot of the SDNHM group.

BioBlitz 2010 from Will Parson on Vimeo.

Beetles Devour a Mouse Specimen from Will Parson on Vimeo.

You can all watch my video on Animal Planet’s Weird True and Freaky tonight at 9:30. The clip has been on Youtube for a couple years and amassed 20,000 views, which is how a few production companies have found it and contacted me. The version above is silent, but if you watch it on Youtube, you will be treated to some pretty awful royalty-free background music.

OK, here’s the whole story:

When I was in college studying biology a couple years ago, I volunteered in a lab studying the genetics of mouse development. The nascent germ of my photography bug was manifesting itself, however, in a time lapse I made about my research subjects – mouse skeletons. I would get my specimens as fleshy skinless corpses, minus testes, from a grad student in the lab who was studying mouse sperm. In order to get the delicate mouse skeleton nice and clean, I started and raised a colony of dermestid beetles, which are also known as carpet beetles, but for all intents and purposes are flesh-eating beetles.

I made my video during the initial rise in popularity of Youtube time-lapses, the ones of normal people every day for a year or five, set to dramatic piano music. Corpse Bride, the first movie completely captured with a consumer digital still camera, had been out for a couple years.

So, with a freeware bit of programming gleaned from the internet, I was able to put my camera on a tripod, connect it to my laptop, and leave it overnight. Files went straight to my hard drive as small jpegs, enough for even the highest of high definition video. The time span was roughly 12 hours, so I used an AC adapter to power a Canon Digital Rebel XT instead of a battery. Since the camera was so close to the mouse, I was fine using the pop-up flash as a light source, because the extremely close subject distance increased the apparent distance between the camera axis and my light source, making my pop-up flash seem more like an umbrella. My Canon Speedlite 580EX would have run out of battery after a few hundred exposures anyway. I knew that the pop-up flash would guess the exposure, which could potentially mean uneven exposures and a post-processing headache, but since the scene wasn’t changing I was able to dial in the correct Ev compensation (about +1 stops because of all the white paper towels I put down) and assume correctly that the camera would guess the same exposure every time.

If there was one thing I could change about the process, I would have pinned the mouse down. As the corpse dried, the beetles made it all dance-happy.

Under the guise of taking some stock photos of university-themed subjects, I recently hung out with a friend of mine in a lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The time I spent crouched in his cramped corner of the lab reminded me of my own short laboratory career when I was a biology student. Luckily there was enough room for at least one of my umbrellas.

I’m pretty sure I will always like being on my side of the camera better, but science has always been one of my defining passions. I see science photography is the mixing of two very alluring fields, and just thinking about it now makes me want to find the nearest PhD and casually ask how the test tubes are looking today.

A few long years ago I was a student of evolutionary biology, humbly studying little deer mouse skeletons.  Who would have known that from a simple project preparing and measuring mouse vertebrae I would be left with not just a lasting fondness for evolutionary genetics, but also an appreciation for the graphic visuals of basic research?

The work was done in the lab of one Dr. Hopi Hoekstra, now at Harvard University.