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During several years, Octavio Aburto thought of one photo. Now, he finally got it. The recently published photograph by Aburto, titled “David and Goliath” (it his in fact David Castro, one of his research science colleagues at the center of this stunning image) has been widely shared over the last few weeks. It was taken at Cabo Pulmo National Park (Mexico) and submitted to the National Geographic photo contest 2012. Here, he captures the sheer size of fish aggregations in perspective with a single human surrounded by abundant marine life. On a recent interview, he explains:
[…] … this “David and Goliath” image is speaking to the courtship behavior of one particular species of Jack fish. […] Many people say that a single image is worth a thousand words, but a single image can also represent thousands of data points and countless statistical analyses. One image, or a small series of images can tell a complicated story in a very simple way. […] The picture you see was taken November 1st, 2012. But this picture has been in my mind for three years — I have been trying to capture this image ever since I saw the behavior of these fish and witnessed the incredible tornado that they form during courtship. So, I guess you could say this image took almost three years. […], in mission-blue.org , Dec. 2012.
Video – Behind the scenes of David and Goliath image. This photo was taken at Cabo Pulmo National Park and submitted to the National Geographic photo contest 2012. You can see more of his images from this place and about Mexican seas on Octavio‘s web link.
“What bothers us about primordial beauty is that it is no longer characteristic. Unspoiled places sadden us because they are, in an important sense, no longer true.” – Robert Adams.
Living and working mostly in Colorado for nearly 30 years, Robert Adams was mostly concerned about a palimpsest of alterations, unfolding in front of his camera in plain western America. Even if unperceivable for so many, the landscape in turmoil was his medium. And it was there, he found out what beauty is not. In 1975, New Topographics encapsulated an evolving Man-altered landscape in an exhibition that end-up by signalling a pivotal key moment in American landscape photography. His sensibility and aesthetic approach remains pertinent today among us. One needs to only replace random and lost inanimate landscapes with random lonely people.
Photo – Amazing picture from the annular eclipse taken on May 21, 2012, Japan. Sun as a crescent moon. Moon as a perfect circle sun. And a jet plane crossing both worlds in counter black/white contrast [by “Ryu Gu” @ryuki_guilty15 (pic link) via/RT @caranha unbelievable shot of a plane flying by the #eclipse in Japan (via Twitter)].
Moon moves (here almost at the end) after a full eclipse position reaching annularity during the first annular eclipse seen in the U.S. and Mexico since 1994 on May 20, 2012. Differing from a total solar eclipse, the moon in an annular eclipse appears too small to cover the sun completely, leaving a ring of fire effect around the moon. The eclipse is casting a shallow path crossing the West from west Texas to Oregon then arcing across the northern Pacific Ocean to Shangai and Tokyo, Japan (May 21, 2012). The whole effect endured about 5 minutes. (more photos here).
Photo – (Stairway to…) Lisbon April 2012.
Photo – (Profligate Nature) Sintra Nov. 6 2011.
Photo – (Repeated Profligate Nature) Sintra Nov. 6 2011 (click to enlarge).
Photo – (Dominoes I) Left alone in the previous night, an empty dominoes table at Sanlúcar de Guadiana (one of my favorite places – taken last weekend; Oct. 2 2011).
“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom“, ~ Richard Feynman (referring to NanoTechnology).
There are huge life scales in our world with which we are not acquainted to. While some prefer to wonder about “alien life” on movie theaters simultaneously eating popcorn, right here at Planet Earth, some lakes and rivers are full of them. What you see above is a tiny water flea ‘Crown Thorns‘ photographed by zoologist Jan Michels (Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany). It was nominated as the best microscopic life image of 2009, last week, at BioScapes (short for Biological landscapes – a competition sponsored by Olympus in order to recognize microscope photos of plants, animals, and other life-forms that capture the “fascinating minutia of life”).
The snaking ridge at top left took top honors in the 2009 BioScapes microscope imaging contest. If water flea parents sense that their habitat is shared by their main predators, tadpole shrimp, the flea offspring sport these pointy crowns – which are unappetizing to the shrimp. Jan Michels, added a dye to reveal the tiny animal’s exoskeleton (green) and cellular nuclei (blue smudges). The blue-and-red dots are one of the animal’s compound eyes, like those of a fly.
This image, kind of remembers me of another one I used in the past for a series of Artificial Intelligence conferences I have held in the past, during 2004 (Budapest, Hungary), 2005 (Muroran, Japan) and 2006 (Jinan, China) (SIP workshop series – Swarm Intelligence and Patterns). This image below was used as the conference symbol; a termite head scanned trough SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) taken by University of Toronto, Canada.
But probably one of the images I most love at this nano-scale is one of a red ant grabbing a tiny electronic circuit board (microchip) on his mouth (Science Museum, UK). Reason is simple. This image (below) could have several readings. By using SEM, image is formed by focusing an electron beam onto the sample surface. As the beam scans across the surface the sample emits secondary electrons which are then detected and used to modulate the image signal much like a television. More electrons is translated into a brighter image. As the beam scans the surface each point is mapped out just as the electron beam in a television maps the image onto the screen. Here we are able to see all the details of one of natures smallest denizens holding one of mankind’s smallest creations, a silicon microchip (the building blocks of digital electronics).
What’s funny is that ant colonies are known (among many other interesting features) for their remarkable cemetery organization capabilities, that is, their sequential clustering task of corpses and objects (as this microchip below). Ant colonies do show that the coordination and regulation of building activities do not depend on the workers themselves but are mainly achieved by the nest structure: a stimulating object configuration triggers the response of a termite worker, transforming the configuration into another configuration that may trigger in turn another (possibly different) action performed by the same termite or any other worker in the colony.
Ants do all this by simple manipulating objects using stigmergic capabilities. Ants form piles of items such as dead bodies (corpses), larvae, or grains of sand. Initially, they deposit items at random locations. When other ants perceive deposited items, they are stimulated to deposit items next to them, being this type of cemetery clustering action, organization, and brood sorting a type of self-organization and adaptive behavior. Some bio-inspired branches of computer science use this kind of behaviors to solve highly complex problems, such as Data Mining, Data analysis and classification, Data clustering, Image retrieval, among many others.
Indeed, life on its own is the ultimate science-fiction. And, as Richard Feynman mentioned once, there is plenty of room below!
Chemoton § Vitorino Ramos' research notebook 
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