How to show a dung beetle running

I was at the Tenth International Congress for Neuroethology last week, and I think it marked the first time there was a poster competition at this meeting. Jochen Smolka won the poster prize for, “The galloping dung beetle: a new gait in insects and its consequences for navigation.”I was not one of the judges, but this poster caught my attention because of the innovative ways it tried showed the behaviour of the beetles.Jochen made a flipbook:

This was genius. I had a blast out of looking at this. It reminded me of Big Little books, which sometimes had little animations in their corners. I tried to take video of this, but it turns out to be hard to operate a flipbook in one hand while holding a camera phone in the other hand.I asked Jochen how he did this. I was fully expecting that there would be some sort of business that took your video file and converted it into a flipbook.Wrong.Jochen frame grabbed all those images from video he had shot, stuck them into an editor, printed them out eight to a page, and made it by hand. Impressive!

Besides the flipbook, Jochen had another technique that I’ve featured on the blog several times: a QR code with a link to the video online.But the flipbook was more effective: it invites someone to stop and pick it up in a way that a video on the screen does not. A flipbook can’t have connection problems from dodgy wifi, or is less likely to make someone give up in frustration. Even writing this, I ran into problems when tried to get the link to the video to work by typing it into my browser: in the URL listed, is the character between the D and the S a number one, capital letter I or lowercase letter L (lowercase L, as it happened)?This is not Jochen’s first award, either; he also got an award at the Society for Experimental Biology. Nicely done Jochen.Below is a picture of the winners of the poster competition; Jochen is far right. Congratulations to all the recipients!

Trivia! Flipbooks are called daumenkino in German, which roughly translates as “thumb cinema.”