parasites are not degenerates there
actually may be the most successful
life-form on earth
and they do all sorts of amazing things
they were using their hosts for all
sorts of nefarious purposes to get what
they needed if you see a ladybug huddled
over some little bit of fluff you’re
looking at a zombie bodyguard so
originally when they were organizing
this talk they’d we’re trying to
convince us to dress up and I wasn’t
quite willing to do that but I did bring
my favorite t-shirt so if you can’t tell
that’s a schistosomiasis creatures was
to get past this visceral aversion we
all have towards parasites and try to
show how amazing these creatures really
are so if I’m gonna try to convince you
that parasites are cool I’m gonna start
with the star of the show so this is a
ladybug standing guard over the cocoon
of a wasp and the way this works is that
wasp lays an egg it injects an egg into
that ladybug and the egg hatches and it
grows inside the ladybug and the larval
wasp inside actually knows to avoid the
vital organs of that ladybug because if
it chews on those vital organs it’ll
kill the ladybug and it will die too so
it avoids the vital organs and when it’s
ready to come out it pushes its way out
of the abdomen of that ladybug and it
spins its cocoon and the problem is this
cocoon is a very vulnerable stage in the
lifecycle of this wasp it’s just sitting
there in mobile ready to be eaten by any
predator that walks by so that’s why
it’s gotten this ladybug to stand guard
over it and the amazing thing is this
ladybug will sit there
twitching for days over this this wasp
and if it’s able to survive
the seven days that the wasp takes to
develop into an adult the ladybug can
actually recover the mind control can
wear off and that ladybug can go to
regrow its internal organs and go on to
reproduce this is the wasp that’s
responsible for that this is Dinah
campus coccynelle II it’s she’s barely a
centimeter long and I can tell she’s a
female both because she’s got this
ovipositor at the end stinger that she
uses to inject the eggs and also because
this species is parthenogenetic which
means it does not need to fertilize its
eggs to reproduce it can clone itself
and so it injects an egg into the
ladybug it does not need to be
fertilized and all of those eggs will
develop to be more females the entire
species is female actually there’s been
four or five males that have been
identified over the course of studying
this creature and frankly I don’t really
know how that works
I don’t know how parthenogenesis works
it’s crazy and it’ll have to be the
topic of another discussion now ladybugs
are not the only ones that get turned
into bodyguards there’s another wasp in
this family Briona d that infects
caterpillars and in this case it injects
several dozen eggs at the same time and
those eggs hatch inside the caterpillar
and just like with the ladybug they know
to avoid the internal organs of the
caterpillar and just like the ladybug
they have a virus that helps them it’s a
different kind of virus but in this case
the virus tricks the immune system of
the caterpillar to protect to hide these
invaders and the virus actually changes
the metabolism of the caterpillar so
that it gorges itself and it prevents
the caterpillar from transforming into
an adult so the virus turns the
caterpillar into a feeding machine for
these wasp larvae so this is a video of
this process it starts with the adult
wasp stinging and injecting those egg
into a newly hatched caterpillar those
caterpillars then go about their normal
life for the next week feeding and
growing and waiting for those wasp
larvae to emerge and when they’re ready
they chew their way through the skin of
the caterpillar and they come out by the
dozens
so they actually spin their cocoons as
they’re emerging from the caterpillar
the amazing thing about this process is
that the caterpillar survives it wakes
up it crawls on top of that pile of
cocoons and it spins that additional
layer of protective silk and the reason
for this though in the entire purpose of
this protection is to prevent this this
is a hyper parasitoid wasp injecting its
egg into the parasitic wasp that just
emerged from the caterpillar so an
additional layer of parasitism above the
mind-controlling one it’s pretty cool
so this theme of trying to protect the
that delicate larval stage that that few
patient that’s a common theme and
there’s actually another wasp in a
different group that uses a different
approach than the bodyguard style what
it does is it catches a spider and it
lays an egg on its back so this is a
spider that lives in the palm
plantations of Costa Rica and it’s got a
wasp larva hanging on its back this is
one that’s hatched out and it’s feeding
on the hemolymph the blood of that
spider and what it does when it’s ready
to pupate instead of turning that spider
into a bodyguard it gets the spider to
build a special kind of web and so
normally webs are designed to catch
insects this web is designed to support
the weight of the cocoon
and so the wasp larva waits until the
spiders done building this web it then
kills it and then hangs its cocoon
safely off the floor of the forest so
this is the stage where the spider has
just finished building that web and the
wasp returns the favor by killing it and
eating it and this is that specialized
web and you can tell what the spider
built because the ciders spider silk is
white and wasp silk is yellow so this is
a video starting with after the spider
has been killed that wasp larva is
feeding on every last drop of the
spiders blood in order to store up
enough energy to transform into an adult
and then when it’s ready to transform
its finished digesting that spider it
then drops its own silk off of the
spiderweb and spins its cocoon and you
can actually see how it uses its head to
hollow out the cavity inside of that
cocoon these wasps have figured out this
mind-control thing pretty well and the
queen of all mind-controlling wasps is
the emerald cockroach wasp so this is a
wasp that hunts cockroaches to feed its
young and it is more cunning and
sophisticated than your typical predator
like a lion or a shark so what it does
is it starts by paralyzing the cockroach
it stings it right behind its head
paralyzes the cockroach and then it
snakes its stinger into the brain of the
cockroach where it has special sensors
so that it can grope around the brain
and find exactly the part that is
responsible for generating the
motivation for movement and it disables
that part and what that means is the
cockroach is fully functional all of its
muscles work but it cannot generate the
will to move on its own instead it takes
its cues from the wasp so the wasp comes
back it holds the antennae of that
cockroach but with its mouth and it
leads it as if walking a dog to its
burrow where it lays an egg on its belly
and buries it to be eaten alive by its
babies and those wasp larvae just like
the others they know how to avoid the
internal organs they can keep it fresh
as long as possible and on top of that
they actually smear this disinfecting
substance on the inside of the cockroach
to keep it from rotting this is a
horsehair worm it’s using its host as
both housing and transportation so in
this case that worm grows up inside the
cricket and once it gets a little
cramped in there it wants to come out
and really this were
has a free-living part of its life stage
it doesn’t live its whole life in the
cricket but the problem is where it
comes out has to be wet it’s an aquatic
worm when it comes out and so if it came
out on dry land it would dry up and die
so it makes the cricket go find water so
that it can jump in commit suicide and
that worm can go on to continue with
life cycle so in that pond or in that
stream the worm will go find a mate
it’ll lay a bunch of eggs those eggs
hatch and they burrow into mosquito
larvae and they insist themselves in the
skiel larvae so when the mosquitoes
emerge and they fly out the cysts are
still there and that mosquito lives its
normal life it dies on land and it gets
eaten by cricket and the worm cysts
actually knows when it’s inside of a
cricket and that’s when it knows it can
start developing and that’s how the life
cycle continues this is an ant that has
been infected by ophiocordyceps and this
fungus it gets the ant to crawl up the
stock of a plant out to the end of the
leaf and it kills the ant there so that
when the fungus sends its reproductive
structures out those spores are better
able to disperse onto the forest floor
this is actually a really diverse group
of fungi and each species of fungus has
its own host and it gets its host to
clamp down in different parts of the
plant some of them are the tip of the
leaf some of them are the underside some
of them are at the base of a tree and
it’s thought that they’re manipulating
their hosts to maximise the ability to
disperse on to more ants and so they’ve
actually shown there’s places where the
fungus is getting the ant to die above
the foraging lines of its colony so that
when those spores come out they’re more
likely to get in contact with more ants
and actually the white eye you see here
that’s fungus as well so what the fungus
does is it hollows out the entire inside
of that ant and it just happens at the
exoskeleton right in front of the eye
that’s thin enough that you can see the
fungal tissue through that eye membrane
so this is video of an ant this is the
different species of ant that’s also
been infected by this cordyceps fungus
ophiocordyceps fungus it’s in its last
hour of life it’s just twitching there
the fungus has forced it to bite down on
the edge of this leaf and what happens
is that first night after that fungus
kills the ant it bursts through the
weaker joints of the exoskeleton and it
spends the next week growing a
reproductive stock out of the back of
that ants head now my favorite parasite
that I photographed is the rise of Seth
one the rise encephalon is a tiny little
parasitic barnacle that infects sheep
crabs this is a sheep crab here and what
it does is it gets into the sheep crab
and if the sheep crab started off as a
male it turns it into a female it
feminized as the crab and that’s because
only female crabs have this structure
that can house eggs and so the parasite
waits for this feminized male to grow
this egg chamber it lays its own eggs in
that egg chamber and then it activates
the maternal care instinct of this crab
so that it thinks it’s pregnant and it
will care for the eggs of the parasite
then every two weeks
those eggs mature and they hatch out and
they go on to infect more crabs and so
what you see here is every little speck
in this photo is a newly hatched
parasitic barnacle that is going out to
infect a new crab so let me let me back
up and tell you a little bit more about
where the story came from where the idea
came from so I was working with my
editor Todd James and you know he just
said look we got to figure out a fresh
approach to this it’s got to be
something different and you know I
agreed I the pictures of parasites I had
seen to that point were like jars of
leeches or worm getting pulled out of
somebody’s eye and it’s like they were
very successful at grossing you
but they really failed at getting you to
appreciate how incredible these
creatures are but then there was also
the sake of this this problem of okay
well how do i light these creatures
these parasites in a new way because up
until that point macro photography for
me was to find a cool bug shine some
light on it take a picture you know and
you can make it a sharp light you could
make it a soft light you could light it
from this way or that way that was about
it I mean how how do i how do I take
this to a next level how do I find a
more interesting way to light these
creatures and I had this idea while I
was sitting in my friend Stacy’s
apartment in Oakland and I don’t
remember what we were talking about
because I was distracted by the quality
of light on her face she was sitting in
front of a window this is Stacy in front
of her window in Oakland and the window
light was coming around her head the
lighting the sides of her cheeks and her
nose and showing the topography in a way
that had never really thought about
before and I thought how do i scale this
down to a parasite level can I use this
to light parasites and show the shape
and the contours in a new way and so I
had my Stacy light I had my volcano
light I had this idea of how to light
backgrounds to emphasize the drama and
the action going on but you know what
does that really look like to implement
in the field well let me show you most
of the work was done in hotel rooms so
this is a hotel room in Costa Rica where
I’m trying to photograph this spider
being parasitized by a wasp
there’s buckets of spiders everywhere
that I’m trying to hides in the
housekeeping staff so they won’t throw
them out
and then you know hotel rooms really
aren’t well designed for photography so
there’s a lot of moving furniture around
and in this case what I’m trying to do
is I’m trying to set up a time lapse of
these fungus flowers and South Dakota
growing and I borrowed this light that
had been confiscated from an illegal
marijuana growing operation in Spearfish
and had been donated to the University
who then lent it to me now after all
this effort it totally failed it was not
useful at all and I end up building a
lot of my own contraptions lighting
contraptions so in this case I was
trying to use these fiber optic line
light to build a makeshift scanner to
scan this plant because there’s a
beautiful quality of life that flatbed
scanners produce on flowers and I wanted
to try to make that in it again totally
failed it was a pain in the butt to use
and didn’t really work out this is the
setup I used a photograph to cover in a
lab in Montreal and so I was able to set
up in some research labs which has some
advantages and disadvantages the main
disadvantage is sometimes you don’t have
a lot of space this is in Boulder at
Pete Johnson’s lab where I’m trying to
photograph this deformed frog of all
these creatures though that the most
difficult to photograph was actually
that cricket and I visited this lab in
New Mexico a couple of times where Ben
Donald had these infected crickets in
his lab and the first time they all died
the night before I got there the second
time they weren’t ready that worms took
too long to to mature so they weren’t
ready when I got there and I just said
you know what forget this and I packed
him into my bag and I flew back with
them to California and so my my
housemates at this point are used to
this kind of nonsense and one of them is
documentary filmmaker and so he filmed
me photographing these crickets so I
kept them in the in the hot water heater
room where they would stay warm this is
my kitchen and the thing about these
crickets and the worms is that you can
actually tell when the worms are ready
to
come out they actually turned dark brown
and you can see them coiled up inside
the belly of these crickets and so I’m
setting up my fiber-optic lights and
getting ready to photograph these things
not my best here today no most of this
stuff happens at two o’clock in the
morning and so I sort of didn’t remember
that he was filming me that David and so
I’m actually putting a layer of rain-x
down on the glass and so that beads up
the water nicely and then I put the
crickets in the fridge for a few minutes
to cool them down so they wouldn’t hop
all over the place and the liquid that
I’m using is not actually water it’s a
called cricket saline it’s a solution
that mimics the internal chemistry of
the cricket so that when the worms come
out they don’t freak out they think
they’re it’s still inside the cricket
so that picture took me about 23 days to
figure out no I wanted that I did at
home and so it was not like I was
working on it 24 hours a day some days
it was only a couple of hours but all
those tricks with with the rain-x with
the fridge with the crickets sailing
these are not things I knew about ahead
of time there’s things that I just had
to work out on the fly through one
iteration after the next and you figure
out a problem or you you come across a
problem you just have to figure out a
solution the crickets too jumpy the
worms freaking out the water doesn’t
look right and you just have to take
what what you’ve solved and build on
that and so there was a point early on
in the story where my editor Todd wanted
to see my my progress on the story and
you know he didn’t really have time to
look through all my pictures so he
wanted to send me he wanted me to just
send him a small selection and really I
wanted him to select see all my pictures
because I wanted to show him all the
different variations I did I assumed he
was going to tell me oh go back and
shoot that from another angle and I
wanted to be able to tell him look man I
tried all the angles so but he asked for
he asked for a limited selection and so
I was scanning through these pictures
was late at night I was listening to
some electronic music to keep me awake
and all of a sudden this the images on
my screen started to sync up with the
music I was listening to and I had this
idea that wait a minute if I I can just
take all of these images and I can
create a stop-motion by playing them all
at 15 frames a second that way in five
minutes Todd can see every image I’ve
taken and all of the iterations and the
variation I did in between and I just
threw the layer of music on top just for
kicks but by the end of the story I had
about 33,000 pictures and even at 15
frames a second that’s a very long video
so I cut that down and here is the
edited version
that original dubstep parasite music
video
you
actually may be the most successful
life-form on earth
and they do all sorts of amazing things
they were using their hosts for all
sorts of nefarious purposes to get what
they needed if you see a ladybug huddled
over some little bit of fluff you’re
looking at a zombie bodyguard so
originally when they were organizing
this talk they’d we’re trying to
convince us to dress up and I wasn’t
quite willing to do that but I did bring
my favorite t-shirt so if you can’t tell
that’s a schistosomiasis creatures was
to get past this visceral aversion we
all have towards parasites and try to
show how amazing these creatures really
are so if I’m gonna try to convince you
that parasites are cool I’m gonna start
with the star of the show so this is a
ladybug standing guard over the cocoon
of a wasp and the way this works is that
wasp lays an egg it injects an egg into
that ladybug and the egg hatches and it
grows inside the ladybug and the larval
wasp inside actually knows to avoid the
vital organs of that ladybug because if
it chews on those vital organs it’ll
kill the ladybug and it will die too so
it avoids the vital organs and when it’s
ready to come out it pushes its way out
of the abdomen of that ladybug and it
spins its cocoon and the problem is this
cocoon is a very vulnerable stage in the
lifecycle of this wasp it’s just sitting
there in mobile ready to be eaten by any
predator that walks by so that’s why
it’s gotten this ladybug to stand guard
over it and the amazing thing is this
ladybug will sit there
twitching for days over this this wasp
and if it’s able to survive
the seven days that the wasp takes to
develop into an adult the ladybug can
actually recover the mind control can
wear off and that ladybug can go to
regrow its internal organs and go on to
reproduce this is the wasp that’s
responsible for that this is Dinah
campus coccynelle II it’s she’s barely a
centimeter long and I can tell she’s a
female both because she’s got this
ovipositor at the end stinger that she
uses to inject the eggs and also because
this species is parthenogenetic which
means it does not need to fertilize its
eggs to reproduce it can clone itself
and so it injects an egg into the
ladybug it does not need to be
fertilized and all of those eggs will
develop to be more females the entire
species is female actually there’s been
four or five males that have been
identified over the course of studying
this creature and frankly I don’t really
know how that works
I don’t know how parthenogenesis works
it’s crazy and it’ll have to be the
topic of another discussion now ladybugs
are not the only ones that get turned
into bodyguards there’s another wasp in
this family Briona d that infects
caterpillars and in this case it injects
several dozen eggs at the same time and
those eggs hatch inside the caterpillar
and just like with the ladybug they know
to avoid the internal organs of the
caterpillar and just like the ladybug
they have a virus that helps them it’s a
different kind of virus but in this case
the virus tricks the immune system of
the caterpillar to protect to hide these
invaders and the virus actually changes
the metabolism of the caterpillar so
that it gorges itself and it prevents
the caterpillar from transforming into
an adult so the virus turns the
caterpillar into a feeding machine for
these wasp larvae so this is a video of
this process it starts with the adult
wasp stinging and injecting those egg
into a newly hatched caterpillar those
caterpillars then go about their normal
life for the next week feeding and
growing and waiting for those wasp
larvae to emerge and when they’re ready
they chew their way through the skin of
the caterpillar and they come out by the
dozens
so they actually spin their cocoons as
they’re emerging from the caterpillar
the amazing thing about this process is
that the caterpillar survives it wakes
up it crawls on top of that pile of
cocoons and it spins that additional
layer of protective silk and the reason
for this though in the entire purpose of
this protection is to prevent this this
is a hyper parasitoid wasp injecting its
egg into the parasitic wasp that just
emerged from the caterpillar so an
additional layer of parasitism above the
mind-controlling one it’s pretty cool
so this theme of trying to protect the
that delicate larval stage that that few
patient that’s a common theme and
there’s actually another wasp in a
different group that uses a different
approach than the bodyguard style what
it does is it catches a spider and it
lays an egg on its back so this is a
spider that lives in the palm
plantations of Costa Rica and it’s got a
wasp larva hanging on its back this is
one that’s hatched out and it’s feeding
on the hemolymph the blood of that
spider and what it does when it’s ready
to pupate instead of turning that spider
into a bodyguard it gets the spider to
build a special kind of web and so
normally webs are designed to catch
insects this web is designed to support
the weight of the cocoon
and so the wasp larva waits until the
spiders done building this web it then
kills it and then hangs its cocoon
safely off the floor of the forest so
this is the stage where the spider has
just finished building that web and the
wasp returns the favor by killing it and
eating it and this is that specialized
web and you can tell what the spider
built because the ciders spider silk is
white and wasp silk is yellow so this is
a video starting with after the spider
has been killed that wasp larva is
feeding on every last drop of the
spiders blood in order to store up
enough energy to transform into an adult
and then when it’s ready to transform
its finished digesting that spider it
then drops its own silk off of the
spiderweb and spins its cocoon and you
can actually see how it uses its head to
hollow out the cavity inside of that
cocoon these wasps have figured out this
mind-control thing pretty well and the
queen of all mind-controlling wasps is
the emerald cockroach wasp so this is a
wasp that hunts cockroaches to feed its
young and it is more cunning and
sophisticated than your typical predator
like a lion or a shark so what it does
is it starts by paralyzing the cockroach
it stings it right behind its head
paralyzes the cockroach and then it
snakes its stinger into the brain of the
cockroach where it has special sensors
so that it can grope around the brain
and find exactly the part that is
responsible for generating the
motivation for movement and it disables
that part and what that means is the
cockroach is fully functional all of its
muscles work but it cannot generate the
will to move on its own instead it takes
its cues from the wasp so the wasp comes
back it holds the antennae of that
cockroach but with its mouth and it
leads it as if walking a dog to its
burrow where it lays an egg on its belly
and buries it to be eaten alive by its
babies and those wasp larvae just like
the others they know how to avoid the
internal organs they can keep it fresh
as long as possible and on top of that
they actually smear this disinfecting
substance on the inside of the cockroach
to keep it from rotting this is a
horsehair worm it’s using its host as
both housing and transportation so in
this case that worm grows up inside the
cricket and once it gets a little
cramped in there it wants to come out
and really this were
has a free-living part of its life stage
it doesn’t live its whole life in the
cricket but the problem is where it
comes out has to be wet it’s an aquatic
worm when it comes out and so if it came
out on dry land it would dry up and die
so it makes the cricket go find water so
that it can jump in commit suicide and
that worm can go on to continue with
life cycle so in that pond or in that
stream the worm will go find a mate
it’ll lay a bunch of eggs those eggs
hatch and they burrow into mosquito
larvae and they insist themselves in the
skiel larvae so when the mosquitoes
emerge and they fly out the cysts are
still there and that mosquito lives its
normal life it dies on land and it gets
eaten by cricket and the worm cysts
actually knows when it’s inside of a
cricket and that’s when it knows it can
start developing and that’s how the life
cycle continues this is an ant that has
been infected by ophiocordyceps and this
fungus it gets the ant to crawl up the
stock of a plant out to the end of the
leaf and it kills the ant there so that
when the fungus sends its reproductive
structures out those spores are better
able to disperse onto the forest floor
this is actually a really diverse group
of fungi and each species of fungus has
its own host and it gets its host to
clamp down in different parts of the
plant some of them are the tip of the
leaf some of them are the underside some
of them are at the base of a tree and
it’s thought that they’re manipulating
their hosts to maximise the ability to
disperse on to more ants and so they’ve
actually shown there’s places where the
fungus is getting the ant to die above
the foraging lines of its colony so that
when those spores come out they’re more
likely to get in contact with more ants
and actually the white eye you see here
that’s fungus as well so what the fungus
does is it hollows out the entire inside
of that ant and it just happens at the
exoskeleton right in front of the eye
that’s thin enough that you can see the
fungal tissue through that eye membrane
so this is video of an ant this is the
different species of ant that’s also
been infected by this cordyceps fungus
ophiocordyceps fungus it’s in its last
hour of life it’s just twitching there
the fungus has forced it to bite down on
the edge of this leaf and what happens
is that first night after that fungus
kills the ant it bursts through the
weaker joints of the exoskeleton and it
spends the next week growing a
reproductive stock out of the back of
that ants head now my favorite parasite
that I photographed is the rise of Seth
one the rise encephalon is a tiny little
parasitic barnacle that infects sheep
crabs this is a sheep crab here and what
it does is it gets into the sheep crab
and if the sheep crab started off as a
male it turns it into a female it
feminized as the crab and that’s because
only female crabs have this structure
that can house eggs and so the parasite
waits for this feminized male to grow
this egg chamber it lays its own eggs in
that egg chamber and then it activates
the maternal care instinct of this crab
so that it thinks it’s pregnant and it
will care for the eggs of the parasite
then every two weeks
those eggs mature and they hatch out and
they go on to infect more crabs and so
what you see here is every little speck
in this photo is a newly hatched
parasitic barnacle that is going out to
infect a new crab so let me let me back
up and tell you a little bit more about
where the story came from where the idea
came from so I was working with my
editor Todd James and you know he just
said look we got to figure out a fresh
approach to this it’s got to be
something different and you know I
agreed I the pictures of parasites I had
seen to that point were like jars of
leeches or worm getting pulled out of
somebody’s eye and it’s like they were
very successful at grossing you
but they really failed at getting you to
appreciate how incredible these
creatures are but then there was also
the sake of this this problem of okay
well how do i light these creatures
these parasites in a new way because up
until that point macro photography for
me was to find a cool bug shine some
light on it take a picture you know and
you can make it a sharp light you could
make it a soft light you could light it
from this way or that way that was about
it I mean how how do i how do I take
this to a next level how do I find a
more interesting way to light these
creatures and I had this idea while I
was sitting in my friend Stacy’s
apartment in Oakland and I don’t
remember what we were talking about
because I was distracted by the quality
of light on her face she was sitting in
front of a window this is Stacy in front
of her window in Oakland and the window
light was coming around her head the
lighting the sides of her cheeks and her
nose and showing the topography in a way
that had never really thought about
before and I thought how do i scale this
down to a parasite level can I use this
to light parasites and show the shape
and the contours in a new way and so I
had my Stacy light I had my volcano
light I had this idea of how to light
backgrounds to emphasize the drama and
the action going on but you know what
does that really look like to implement
in the field well let me show you most
of the work was done in hotel rooms so
this is a hotel room in Costa Rica where
I’m trying to photograph this spider
being parasitized by a wasp
there’s buckets of spiders everywhere
that I’m trying to hides in the
housekeeping staff so they won’t throw
them out
and then you know hotel rooms really
aren’t well designed for photography so
there’s a lot of moving furniture around
and in this case what I’m trying to do
is I’m trying to set up a time lapse of
these fungus flowers and South Dakota
growing and I borrowed this light that
had been confiscated from an illegal
marijuana growing operation in Spearfish
and had been donated to the University
who then lent it to me now after all
this effort it totally failed it was not
useful at all and I end up building a
lot of my own contraptions lighting
contraptions so in this case I was
trying to use these fiber optic line
light to build a makeshift scanner to
scan this plant because there’s a
beautiful quality of life that flatbed
scanners produce on flowers and I wanted
to try to make that in it again totally
failed it was a pain in the butt to use
and didn’t really work out this is the
setup I used a photograph to cover in a
lab in Montreal and so I was able to set
up in some research labs which has some
advantages and disadvantages the main
disadvantage is sometimes you don’t have
a lot of space this is in Boulder at
Pete Johnson’s lab where I’m trying to
photograph this deformed frog of all
these creatures though that the most
difficult to photograph was actually
that cricket and I visited this lab in
New Mexico a couple of times where Ben
Donald had these infected crickets in
his lab and the first time they all died
the night before I got there the second
time they weren’t ready that worms took
too long to to mature so they weren’t
ready when I got there and I just said
you know what forget this and I packed
him into my bag and I flew back with
them to California and so my my
housemates at this point are used to
this kind of nonsense and one of them is
documentary filmmaker and so he filmed
me photographing these crickets so I
kept them in the in the hot water heater
room where they would stay warm this is
my kitchen and the thing about these
crickets and the worms is that you can
actually tell when the worms are ready
to
come out they actually turned dark brown
and you can see them coiled up inside
the belly of these crickets and so I’m
setting up my fiber-optic lights and
getting ready to photograph these things
not my best here today no most of this
stuff happens at two o’clock in the
morning and so I sort of didn’t remember
that he was filming me that David and so
I’m actually putting a layer of rain-x
down on the glass and so that beads up
the water nicely and then I put the
crickets in the fridge for a few minutes
to cool them down so they wouldn’t hop
all over the place and the liquid that
I’m using is not actually water it’s a
called cricket saline it’s a solution
that mimics the internal chemistry of
the cricket so that when the worms come
out they don’t freak out they think
they’re it’s still inside the cricket
so that picture took me about 23 days to
figure out no I wanted that I did at
home and so it was not like I was
working on it 24 hours a day some days
it was only a couple of hours but all
those tricks with with the rain-x with
the fridge with the crickets sailing
these are not things I knew about ahead
of time there’s things that I just had
to work out on the fly through one
iteration after the next and you figure
out a problem or you you come across a
problem you just have to figure out a
solution the crickets too jumpy the
worms freaking out the water doesn’t
look right and you just have to take
what what you’ve solved and build on
that and so there was a point early on
in the story where my editor Todd wanted
to see my my progress on the story and
you know he didn’t really have time to
look through all my pictures so he
wanted to send me he wanted me to just
send him a small selection and really I
wanted him to select see all my pictures
because I wanted to show him all the
different variations I did I assumed he
was going to tell me oh go back and
shoot that from another angle and I
wanted to be able to tell him look man I
tried all the angles so but he asked for
he asked for a limited selection and so
I was scanning through these pictures
was late at night I was listening to
some electronic music to keep me awake
and all of a sudden this the images on
my screen started to sync up with the
music I was listening to and I had this
idea that wait a minute if I I can just
take all of these images and I can
create a stop-motion by playing them all
at 15 frames a second that way in five
minutes Todd can see every image I’ve
taken and all of the iterations and the
variation I did in between and I just
threw the layer of music on top just for
kicks but by the end of the story I had
about 33,000 pictures and even at 15
frames a second that’s a very long video
so I cut that down and here is the
edited version
that original dubstep parasite music
video
you
Please follow and like us: