Saturday, February 25, 2017

Gorgeous Meerkat Photography from #Nature #PBS #SpyInTheWild

There is more poetry than hard science in "Spy in the Wild" from Nature on PBS but there's probably no way to get any closer to meerkats and other animals.  (Nature:  Episode 3 | Friendship)

The topic is friendship for the episode and that may bother you with the idea of anthropomorphizing the animals.  The speaker does that to some extent but it's much more the point to observe their similarities to understand them.  In that way we can discover which is behavior all creatures share and which is just coincidence.  That's the science of ethology and many spend their lives studying it.


My own choice was to try to see meerkats at the Fort Worth Zoo since I have been fascinated by them ever since seeing an article in "Smithsonian" magazine lots of years ago.   I figured seeing them was an impossible dream since they were in Africa and I wasn't but the idea of seeing them in a zoo came and that's when going to the one in Fort Worth got into it.  Going to that zoo never happened but there's no possible way I would have got so close to them as the Spy in the Wild got.




Here's the really cracking part:  the photographer is a robo.  It's not a genius robo but it's capable of simple movements as directed by a remote operator.  Dress him up like a meerkat (seriously) and, presto, he becomes one of the family.

There were multiple cameras rigged for these shoots since we see different camera angles throughout but the exceptional idea of using a robo drone for the photography is at the center of it.  There was Robo Drone Meerkat, Robo Drone Wolf, Robo Drone Cobra snake, and you get it.  The really cracking part is the animals bought it.


Maybe you get dismissive in thinking this is something for the kids and it is but you may be surprised at how much you learn from it.  I didn't know the queen meerkat for any given colony is the only female allowed to have babies and isn't that unusual.  There are novel insights like that throughout and it's worth anyone's time to see it.


Thank you to Mystery Lady for a great tip.

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