24 hour time lapse...

DonaldJ

DonaldJ

Third Instar
Just completed a 24 hour time lapse series (one frame every 5 minutes) of the B. Orientalis nymphs doing their thing. Very interesting to see them moving around the different chambers, climbing the stick in the background, but mostly sitting still and doing nothing.

I used Irfanview to create a self-playing slideshow at 5 frames per second, so the 24 hours plays in about a minute. The images were cropped, compressed, and converted to grayscale to keep the file size minimal; it's a little more than 4MB.

Anyone interested in this can send me a PM with their email address; I'll send the slideshow from my GMail account.

Sample frame is attached. I appreciate any criticism of this project.

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Very cool idea! It's always interesting to see how roaches interact over time, especially since most of them aren't day active. Did you notice an increase in activity once it got dark, or do they stay fairly active throughout the day?

 
pannaking22 said:
Very cool idea! It's always interesting to see how roaches interact over time, especially since most of them aren't day active. Did you notice an increase in activity once it got dark, or do they stay fairly active throughout the day?
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Impossible for me to say. The camera rig was in a closet and all images were shot with the built-in flash.

I suspect my B. Orientalis are functionally blind. They have never shown any reaction to light (of various types) at any time...nary a twitch.

They are mostly inactive, with maybe one or two wandering around at any given time. The only times they are all active is when they are introduced into a newly cleaned vivarium, with no familiar scent cues. After a day or so they get comfortable and stay still most of the time.

But I saw something interesting today as I reviewed the latest time lapse. One of the guys dragged a fresh piece of dry dog food across the vivarium to place it next to their housing structure. Nice of him to share it with his buddies, as a couple started immediately feeding. I didn't know they brought their food home with them.

 
DonaldJ said:
Anyone interested in this can send me a PM with their email address; I'll send the slideshow from my GMail account.
Click to expand...
Sorry, but I can't send this slideshow because it is an .exe file, and GMail doesn't allow it.

Fiddlesticks!

 
Tenevanica said:
Ever tried mediafire.com?
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Thanks for the link, but I'm not a big fan of cloud storage, although I'm trying to convert the time lapse sequences to video for YouTube.

There are many issues, though. Frame rate and image size are giving me fits, and I haven't found any free (open source) programs that can work well. Even Irfanview quit giving me good time lapse sequences, and I don't know why...it used to work just fine. I can view the sequence but I can't save it anymore.

The research continues...

 
Sorted most of the issues out and was able to post a reasonable video to YouTube:

This is a different sequence, shot with no flash, 5 sec. exposure per frame.

 
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