High-speed feeding videos *Dialup Warning*

Chris Anderson

Dr. House of Chameleons
Mike and a few other people have been on me for some time to post some of these videos. I've been incredibly busy and haven't had the time to figure out how to get them down to a reasonable size to post online before now. Each video is about 1.5 GB or more. After graduating from Cornell University I've moved down to Tampa, FL where I'm going to grad school, teaching Intro Bio 2 labs and doing research on the kinematics and morphological basis of ballistic tongue projection and protraction in chameleons at USF. Part of my research includes using high speed video cameras to film chameleon feeding events for analysis of performance, velocity, rate of energy release, etc. The videos I'm taking are at a rate of 3000 frames per second which enables me to get an incredible amount of detail.

The following video is subsampled from the full video file and played back at a slower frame rate such that it is now 20 times slower then real time. The original videos I analyze are much larger and have about 5x the number of frames than this subsampled video. I also have the ability to play it back at just about any rate of speed I wish and analyze them frame by frame. This video is of a male Rieppeleon brevicaudatus of 5.5 cm SVL projecting its tongue 9.95 cm. When you click the link, you'll want to click "Full Size" to the bottom left of the video window to view a larger (albeit still small) version of the video:

Click me - Brev01-03 video

Enjoy and hopefully as I get additional time, I'll be able to post more and slowed down more so you can see all the muscles move.

Chris
 
Wow! You would never be able to see the hyoid bone in such detail in photos. I had no idea that the hyoid moved with such dexterity!

Anxious to see more.
 
So neat. Thanks for sharing that. I actually watched it a couple times, even knowing how the structure works, it's still more than fascinating to see it in action.
 
Howdy Chris,

Great video! I've been waiting to view something of this qualtiy :). Let us know if we can ever get access to the GB file(s). I'd love to download one and zoom-in a bit. I was trying to catch the millisecond count-down of the launch to cricket time but it was kind of hard to spot. It looked to be around 20ms-40ms or thereabouts.
 
no fair! you can't win the first video contest before we even have the first video contest!! wtf!... lol ;)

seriously, awesome clip, future contest winner FOR SURE if video contest ever does get implemented here :D
 
whoa! right out of Alien! :eek: That is very cool indeed!

hey, congrats on your graduating from Cornell! :D Quite the switch from Ithaca to Tampa, huh? But you are surely in a more conducive environment for chameleons. Look forward to more videos!

lele
 
Thanks everyone, I appreciate the comments!

Kinyongia - I have over 25 videos at this point and more every week. Hopefully I'll get around to posting more some time soon.

Dave - That video was a projection distance of 9.95 cm with a peak velocity of 5.45 m/s or about 19.6 km/hr. At that distance, there isn't much of a time span at that speed. I might post more, higher quality videos some time as an E-Zine article as soon as I get a moment to finish an issue...

Josh - Fine!

This video was taken by my major professor (Dr. Steve Deban) and is slowed down considerably with a much lower frame rate (don't recall exactly how much). Hope you enjoy it:

Ch. calyptratus video

Chris
 
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