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I'm Frank Graff.

Camera traps reveal the secret lives of forest predators.

See what's possible with virtual reality.

And how high speed cameras make the invisible visible.

It's amazing what you can see shooting at 300,000 frames per second.

It's all coming up on Sci NC.

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You know, studying wildlife is not only amazing, It's also frustrating, because as soon as the critter smells you or sees you, it's gone.

So much for the observation.

Adrian Smith from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences introduces us to a pioneer in the field of using camera traps to study wildlife.

- [Adrian] This is Roland Kays a biologist who will go anywhere to document wildlife.

- All right, that's not too bad.

Also, can you give it up for Gators and snakes?

- [Adrian] I will.

- [Roland] I like projects that get me outdoors that have a sense of adventure and some unknown aspect that needs to be discovered.

- [Adrian] Roland studies mammal movement and ecology using devices like camera traps.

- I like to study wild animals in the field where they are out in the woods or whatever.

And the problem is they see me coming and they run away.

So camera traps give me the option to put out this sensor that I can leave out there and walk away and let the animals start doing their things again.

And then record what happens.

I started using camera traps in 2000.

It was a roll of film.

You had 36 pictures and then that was it because the film ran out.

So since then the cameras have gone digital and they've gone infrared flash.

So those are two major advances because now we can get, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of pictures with one set of batteries and one memory card.

And we use the infrared flash so we're not freaking the animals out with that light.

Now, of course, they're also going video, which gets you a much better view of the behavior of the animal, which is also sometimes important.

So this is our basic setup in the field.

We strap a camera to a tree, put it at about knee height, so it gets to the small guys like squirrels and chipmunks, but also will capture the big guys like bears and deer and elk.

It's got its camera lens, the motion sensor, and then the inference flash is on the side, basically there's different type types of camera traps that they all function more or less the same.

And they save it on a memory card that's here on the inside.

A recent that we've done with camera traps was focused on the predation of deer fawns.

Fawns don't move hardly at all in their first two weeks.

They just sit and hide.

And so understanding how well they're surviving, how often they're dying, and in particular what predators are getting them is really important.

It's a really important question if you want to understand what affects deer populations.

Now, we didn't want to put these up where there were actual fawns because that would have been probably impossible.

So instead we got a fawn decoy, set it out in the woods, just like you would have as a normal fawn, and then set up some camera traps to see what would happen.

So these are the decoys that we use in our font experiment.

We got a lot of them.

They live in here now.

Here, you can see they're the right size.

They've got the spots, they've got the spindly legs, and to a bear this looks like dinner.

There's a period in sort of late spring, early summer when the fawns are being born, when they're sort of being dropped, they say, so we ran our cameras during the same time.

So it was the right time of year when predators are walking around looking for fawns.

And we even sometimes would get pictures of fawns sort of walking along right in front of our fake fawn what it shows that we were in the right place in the right time.

We did this study in North Carolina, and we were particularly interested in areas that had black bears and areas that did not have black bears because everyone knows black bears certainly like to eat deer fawn, but we didn't know how important they would be or how important they would be compared to the other species.

What surprised me most was how often the predator actually jumped right on the fawn and sat there and started chewing on it.

Like we really trick them.

We really got them to think that this was a real fawn.

And you kind of can imagine, you know, the looks on their faces.

I mean, do bears have looks on their faces?

Probably not, but I was imagining them and feeling like, okay, cool, this really worked.

We're getting really good data here.

These predators think they're finding a fawn.

So that means that this is representative of what's really going on in the woods.

Almost every single camera had a predator.

So we've got lots of this footage of bears, bobcats, coyotes, even gray foxes pouncing right on the fawn decoy.

And sometimes an interesting thing was we also got some black vultures.

We ran the camera for two weeks before we put the fawn out and we never got any black vultures.

And then we put the fawn out and all of a sudden we started getting the black vultures.

So it shows that having that fawn there was enough to attract the vultures to the site, and that they're probably an important predator of fawns as well.

Across our study sites we found that if bears were present they were overwhelmingly the most important predator of these little fawns.

But when you get outside of bear ranges, the fawn survived a little bit better.

Then it was a variety of the other predators that filled in you got the coyotes, the bobcats, the foxes, and even the black vultures.

Camera traps capture only a small part of the earth, right?

Maybe 20, 30 feet in front of the camera, you get to measure what's going on.

So depending on how you set up your study, you can have some local information like with the fawns.

What's going on in this very important place where there's a fawn in Eastern North Carolina?

Or if you collaborate and work across a big network, you can have these setup in regular arrays, across the country to monitor trends of populations at really large scales.

So that's how camera traps have really revolutionized how we ask scientific questions about animals out in the wild.

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- Still talking cameras, but what if the object moves so fast the movement is invisible?

Watch what happens with the snapping shrimp.

- [Dr. Sheila] So what we're seeing in this lab are movements and capabilities that are completely invisible to the naked eye.

When we are using these high-speed video cameras, we're often filming at 30,000, 300,000 frames per second, and sometimes only getting like five or six frames of the movements themselves.

We study the invisible, we study what was previously thought was impossible and our first step, in even discovering these things, is just to film them.

- [Frank] Video magic makes the invisible, visible.

- [Jacob] We often choose to film anywhere between 20,000 to 300,000 frames per second, depending on the biological system.

Right?

And what we're looking for is to have enough frames per second to fully capture the movement and then be able to track how that motion changes in its own environment.

And then from there, we can ask really interesting questions about how fast these motions are going?

What is the energetics required to produce this type of movement, given that be in air or in water?

- [Frank] And suddenly nature's wonders are even more all inspiring.

- In a lot of these cases, we don't understand why why do the animals need to move this way?

And that's really where a lot of our research focuses is at that basic level of understanding questions of how and why these animals do what they do.

- These organisms are just playing with the craziest extremes that physics presents us.

- [Frank] Take the snapping shrimp with its giant claw.

- [Jason] And what we just did was glue a toothpick onto its back.

You can leave the toothpick on and it'll melt it off and be perfectly fine.

And that's a way for us to keep it still in this really large tank that we're about to put it in.

One of the things about these high-speed cameras is that you have a pretty small frame of the image and so you want to make sure your animal is in the frame and the angles are right.

So what we're interested in is capturing the motion and also capturing the sound.

And so the camera is going to capture the motion and we have this hydrophone here that we're going to put in and it's going to capture the sound and then we're going to induce it to snap.

They're pretty angry, little animals so they're not that difficult to get to snap.

Basically, if you wave anything in front of its face, it'll snap at you.

So they'll do it for defense predators that might be coming in trying to eat them.

They'll also do it fighting each other.

So they'll compete over mates.

They'll compete over boroughs.

- [Frank] Now, watch and listen.

[shrimp's claw snap] The hydrophone records the snap, but what the high-speed camera captures is truly amazing.

I got to admit, you could see the claw, but, but that water jet and all that, or whatever that is, that is what is that?

That is cool.

- It's very cool.

So for a long time, people had had no idea there was this water jet bubble forming.

And what it is is that if you look on the top of the claw, there's this little tooth, it kind of sticks down and around, and right on the bottom of the claw there's a hole that it fits into.

And so when the shrimp closes, it's a claw really fast, basically what it does is shoot out this jet of water and that moves at incredibly high velocities.

It actually moves so fast that it drops the pressure behind the water to the point that it turns to water vapor.

It's literally boiling it.

It's moving so fast.

And so what that bubble is, is actually a little bubble of water vapor.

That's sitting inside a tank of actual water, and that makes this collapse called the cavitation bubble.

And that's what you're hearing when you hear these sounds.

- Can he aim it?

- Yeah, they can aim it.

And in really highly escalated fights they'll actually shoot these bubbles at each other.

So you'll see them facing each other and they'll actually fire these super intense cavitation bubbles at each other.

So before we were actually able to film this at thousands of frames every single second people thought that sound was just the claw snapping against itself and no one knew that this bubble actually existed.

- [Frank] Remember that sound is the cavitation bubble exploding.

And, until now, the bubble created by the high-speed jet of water was invisible.

So what do you think is you're looking at that?

- How in the world, natural selection and evolution make a system for tiny little shrimp to literally boil water when they're fighting each other.

- [Frank] It's a violent intersection of material science, physical science, stored energy, acceleration, and fluid dynamics, all mastered by a tiny crustacean.

- [Dr. Sheila] How you put those together to do these extraordinary things?

We don't know.

Biology, there's so many pieces where we have no idea.

And to me that's just absolutely thrilling.

You know?

That there's so many things really yeah don't know how that one works.

Let's go try to figure it out.

- [Frank] You couldn call the tiny critters photographed by the lab, the superheroes of the natural world.

- [Ben] And I think it's a really interesting question of why did it evolve this way and why is evolution selecting for this?

Or maybe it's not selecting and it's just totally random.

- So I've spent actually much of my career grappling with that question.

Is this important?

And so I really have a bunch of answers to that.

One is this piece that I think most people immediately grasp onto, which is we could build better devices.

If you discover a hammer, a biological hammer, like many shrimp have that can break through a shell, that's considered like one of the hardest to break materials ever, then you can build lightweight fractures as a materials.

They exist now on the market, completely from the discoveries that we made from a disrupt.

I think that that, that makes a lot of logical sense.

Okay, we're studying these now we have better products.

I think on the other, the other end of the spectrum, there is massive inherent value in new knowledge.

What do we know?

What is the scope of what we even know.

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- Now let's shift from camera's capturing reality to virtual reality.

A North Carolina tech company is creating virtual worlds where students can test a career without actually being in it say medicine.

Science producer Michelle Lotker shows us how virtual and augmented reality can help humans interact.

- Oh, now we're on the moon.

I think.

- [Don] I think if you look right behind you, it's supposed to be the moon.

So this.

- Oh my gosh.

Okay.

So obviously I'm not actually on the moon.

It's all in my head set.

I'm at Cross Com a software development company in Durham, North Carolina, where they're using virtual and augmented reality to create everything from giant fake spiders to replicas of beating human hearts.

- Virtual reality is the kind of experience that would put you in a virtual space outside of, or different from your perception of the real world around you.

You're experiencing and perceiving a world that's entirely different from the room that you're in or the home that you're in or the office.

You're almost magically transported into a different kind of experience or a different kind of place.

- Like this virtual meeting space where I interviewed developer Mike Harris that's his avatar on the right while he was hundreds of miles away in Louisiana.

Recognize the gal on the left?

They made me a virtual version of myself to.

- There's still so much to be discovered in this space.

I mean, obviously being able to have these interactions, the ability to like maintain eye contact and gesture and physically point out objects that you're, that are in your space and sort of create them in real time is amazing.

There's something really powerful about that ability for us to interact like this.

- [Michelle] Even without a high-tech headset to immerse yourself in virtual reality, you can still experience its cousin augmented reality.

In fact, you probably already are if you're using things like Instagram filters or Google Maps.

- Were augmented reality is different is that it's the idea that instead of taking an individual out of their current space or experience to basically add on top of, or augment on top of one's perception of the world around them.

This office is pretty bare bones, but with augmented reality, we could potentially interact with virtual effects, similes of real-world objects.

And so here I have a virtual engine kind of sitting on top of this physical desk.

And if I wanted to kind of observe this engine, I can kind of lean into it and see a little bit closer.

I could even tap on it to expand it and see inside and see all the workings.

And so I'm interacting with this virtual engine as if it was physically here rooted in the space.

Of course, I can make a close up with a top and I can make it disappear and then pull up another object for observation interaction.

- You are physically able to move around the space.

This is kind of your portal into this virtual world.

- Yes, that's exactly right.

There's going to be a lot of applications for this kind of technology.

- [Michelle] From engines to arachnids.

If you're afraid of spiders, this next part might give you the heebee-jeebees, but Don and his team are working with a researcher to develop an app to help treat exactly that kind of phobia.

- If someone is terrified of spiders, I can sit here and talk with them for over about how spiders are safe.

I mean, they already logically know that they say, I know it is illogical, or sometimes they say, I know it's stupid, but I'm afraid of spiders.

Only through exposure to the feared object, gradual exposure that the associative learning of safety happens in the brain and the person feels comfortable with those objects.

It is treatment that works well.

It works with different kinds of phobias, OCD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

But the problem is that we do not have feared objects in the office.

And what the app does is, a software on my computer, which is connected via wi-fi to the HoloLens device or the AR device, and on this app, I see map of the surfaces, which is created by the HoloLens.

And then I also see where the, my patient is positioned, where the head is and where they're looking at.

I can choose the type of spider, whether it's jumping or wolf or black widow, I can choose a color.

I can choose how big they are, which direction they're looking at and place them anywhere in the environment.

And then I can have the spiders move in any direction at any speed I want.

We just recently finished a clinical trial towards the end of the therapy basically you're surrounded by more than 10, huge, like crabs size spiders, all the 14 people that we have treated in this clinical trial responded in less than a one hour average response time, 38 minutes, which is a big advantage over conventional ways of therapy or even VR studies that have looked at.

- I didn't think I was afraid of spiders until we built this app.

And then I realized maybe I do have arachnophobia.

Especially when we were able to create these giant spiders sitting on top of the coffee table, because that's the other thing about virtual and augmented reality is that you could actually create circumstances and situations that actually would be practical if not impossible, to replicate in the real world.

- [Michelle] During the COVID-19 pandemic Cross Com used virtual and augmented reality to help an immersive STEM learning program in Detroit stay connected with high school students.

- So what they would've seen on the tours like the lab and things like that, they got to experience in virtual reality.

- A virtually simulated operating room, a virtually simulated ICU, and we even built in interactive exercises that you would perform if they were to actually physically visit, but even went a step further, to be able to do some things that they wouldn't have been able to do.

Like there was a mock patient on the operating room.

Someone could actually pick up a scalpel and then virtually cut this virtual patient and blood would come out.

- You like physically jumped back.

You're like, oh my God, it's so realistic.

- I always run this module where there's just a lot of input.

So in, in healthcare and medicine, sometimes there's like 20,000 people talking to you.

You're having to pay attention to this.

And your pager goes off and the overhead page goes off and your phone, the kids were stressed.

They were like, you know, one of them said, I have never been this stressed in my life because I was making the environment very stressful.

If we were just here on Zoom, it wouldn't have carried.

They would've seen it like a movie.

It would have been like a TV show would have been Grey's Anatomy.

And it would have been like, okay, they're running that.

But they were in it.

They were immersed.

They heard the sounds.

- [Michelle] Now, instead of being limited to students with VR headsets, even more students can participate through their smartphones using augmented reality.

- [Dr. Heath] I challenged Don and I said, we have to come up with a technology that, you know, doesn't require great wi-fi, which by the way we found out, you know, for many kids, is a struggle.

With AR everyone has a smartphone.

So 95% of the students who want to participate, but don't have the funds let's say for VR, AR is a great substitute.

And it gives you that sense of immersion and participation without all the cost.

I think getting it to a broader audience is important.

All of that leads to really just, you know, helping the next generation succeed.

- [Michelle] You might worry that all of this technology will cause humans to become isolated.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that virtual interaction can help keep us connected.

- [Mike] I remember there was a time early during the pandemic that I had one of these headsets and my father had one as well, and I set it up like a little environment for us to hop in together.

It was just like a little old timey saloon to like have a beer together.

And I remember the feeling of being in his presence was really meaningful to me at that moment, exploring the ways that this technology helps us connect with each other, especially with like families living so distanced from each other and workers working remotely.

I think we've just sort of scratched the surface of how this allows us to actually be more in contact with each other when we can't be physically.

And that's what I'm most excited about.

- [Announcer] Hey, parents, teachers, and home schoolers looking for lesson plans?

You'll find free interactive ones about all types of science covered by Sci NC online.

- Now for a different type of image.

There is no doubt that a sturgeon farm is a unique operation.

That's why a different kind of camera is needed.

Science producer, Rossi Issler explains.

- [Rossi] Fish farmers Brian and Lianne are about to give this Russian sturgeon an ultrasound.

- Boy, that's a feisty one.

It's all right.

- [Rossi] A little prenatal care for the sturgeon is important because one day she'll produce what sturgeon are best known for: Caviar.

Black gold, the darling of fancy cocktail parties worldwide, otherwise known as fish eggs.

But they aren't just any fish eggs.

Caviar only comes from this type of fish, the sturgeon.

- Okay, eggs.I think that would be a female.

Looks like eggs.

See the eggs?

This is definitely a female.

- [Rossi] Sturgeon have been around for 200 million years, but they've been so over fished that some species are close to extinction.

So Marshallberg Farm in Smyrna, North Carolina is farming sturgeon, instead of fishing it.

Their goal is to create a market for North Carolina caviar.

And they're using Russian sturgeon, a fish that used to live in the Caspian Sea.

- [Lianne] The fish that we're raising here don't exist in the wild anymore.

So it's not like we're competing with fishermen or anything.

This fish is farmed.

- [Rossi] Farmed fish have a dirty reputation.

Crowded fish pens along rivers, lakes, and seashores pollute the surrounding environment with waste and food.

But Marshallberg farm grow their sturgeon in above ground tanks avoiding the problem of pollution.

- My father actually started this company and he wanted to sort of prove that America could do aquaculture responsibly.

We've imported about 90% of our seafood here.

And yet a lot of that is coming from unsustainable sources.

- [Rossi] What makes this farm sustainable is how they use water.

- We're a Water, a drinking water treatment plant, and a wastewater treatment plant wrapped up in one.

And we got fish to keep alive.

Water drains out of the tank, drains down into a sump by gravity.

It gets filtered, bacteria eat up the ammonia, and then the water gets pumped back in again.

So it's, it's a loop like this.

Our systems are designed to recirculate the entire volume of the tank once every hour that helps us keep the water clean, keeps them low stress and reduces our stress.

- [Rossi] Keeping the fish stress free is crucial.

Lots of fish can start producing eggs at two years old, but for Russian sturgeon, it can take more than eight years to produce caviar, which is one of the reasons it's so expensive.

- You can imagine the time and patients and frankly, investment that goes into being able to keep something alive for so long.

- That's why clean water is important, but so is space.

On this farm, the females especially have lots of room to wander.

- They can spend most of their energy floating around peacefully bumping heads with each other, perhaps, but more importantly, looking for, for feed that we supplied them on a routine prescribed basis.

- [Lianne] They're cute.

They do little tricks in the water sometimes.

They're cool fish.

- [Rossi] But all good things must come to an end.

Farmers check to see if the female fish are ready for harvest with a small incision, then they'll remove the eggs and process the meat for protein.

Depending on the quality each ounce of these eggs cost around $60.

- [Lianne] Yeah.

So this, this here is about a $200.

It takes a lot to get that product.

- [Rossi] Good quality caviar has a firm texture and pops in your mouth.

This type of caviar is buttery and nutty.

- [Brian] There's a whopper.

- [Rossi] And it takes years of keeping fish happy to get it just right.

- Happy fish equals delicious caviar equals happy maintenance guys.

- And that's it for Sci NC for this week.

I'm Frank Graff.

Thank you for watching.

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