Watch a Biologist Explain How Animals Move in 101 Seconds

Learn how biologists like Victor Ortega Jiménez use high-speed cameras to record fascinating slow motion footage of animals in the wild.

For millennia, humans have observed and have been inspired by the ways that animals move. Some researchers theorize that paintings in famous caves like Chauvet and Lascaux, made more than 30,000 years ago, were designed to show the ways a horse might bend its neck or a bison might run with the aid of a flickering torch. 

Today, biologists like Victor Ortega Jiménez can fire up a high-speed camera and record thousands of frames per second of fascinating animal motion from creatures like hummingbirds, water-strider insects and flamingos. The footage allows them to parse rapid movements that would otherwise be impossible to observe with the naked eye.

As Ortega Jiménez explains in this 101 in 101 video, the study of animal dynamics is the study of the beautiful dance of forces between animal limbs, muscles and wings and environmental challenges, whether that’s pounding rain or the delicate surface tension of a pond’s water.

But before animals get their slow-mo closeups, an idea or a question often strikes a biologist while out in the wild. Once while exploring the Yucatan Peninsula, Ortega Jiménez noticed that hummingbirds were able to fly in the windy and wet weather that can strike the area. How could a bird that only weighs a few grams be soaked in water and buffeted by gusts and continue to fly?

To solve this question, Ortega Jiménez, an assistant professor in Integrative Biology, trained his camera on a hummingbird under similar downpour conditions in the lab. What he found was a revelation in a split second of motion: “We discovered that, actually, they can solve the problem very easily,” says Ortega Jiménez in the video. “When they are flying, they can shake themselves mid air, like dogs.” 

Indeed, much like a canine but while aloft, the hummingbird rolls a shake across its tiny body, reaching ten times the acceleration of gravity. It sends much of the water weight off.

That interest in how animals do what they do continues to drive his lab’s work. Today he’s exploring how water-striders, those insects that glide across the surface of water, are able to use capillary forces to control their movements. His lab is leveraging this knowledge, what’s known as biomimetics, to explore robotics that mimic the water-strider’s maneuvers. 

Other work is peering closely, and in stunning slow motion, at the feeding habits of the flamingo. The birds, he’s found, use hydrological forces and their unique beaks to create vortices that swirl tasty brine shrimp into an easy to suck up column of calories. A better system of water filtration might come from the work.

“I think it’s fascinating when you observe something like this for the first time,” says Ortega Jiménez. “You just open a window of different questions.”

Watch more 101 in 101 videos featuring UC Berkeley faculty and experts here.