Thursday, May 26, 2005

"BarnieCam"

Here's a short bit of video from a new monitoring system I've developed. It consists of a camera mounted in a watertight housing looking upwards through the bottom of a clear acrylic plate. I had several barnacles to settle on the plate over a year ago, and now it is possible to make out the movements of the barnacles inside their shells.

This is a screenshot of the video. Inset on the left is a view of the area where BarnieCam is mounted in the field, though you can't make out the plate in this view. The main screen has 3 barnacles in it. The simultaneous view allows you to see incoming waves and then see the barnacles feed at the same time.


The next image shows the three barnacles outlined. Also note the green arrow which points to the cirral mass of the top barnacle. This is the portion of the barnacle which you can see moving while it is feeding in the video.


Finally, there's a few seconds of video:

The data collected with this setup were published in the following paper:
Miller, L. P. 2007. Feeding in extreme flows: behavior compensates for mechanical constraints in barnacle cirri. Marine Ecology Progress Series, v349, pgs. 227-234 Link to MEPS article