so I wanted to share something super exciting with you guys so Heather and I have been studying coral
reef fish behavior out here in Thailand this is our second expedition and one thing that we've
noticed is you know we're following these fish around we're paying attention to their social
behaviors and how they interact with other fish and it seems like they often act differently
toward one another or rather they're responding differently to one another when there is a lot
of shelter around this shelter comes in the form of coral so these corals they create these large
three-dimensional structures that can provide all kinds of hiding places for these fish that
are vulnerable to predators and so it seems like the social interactions of these fish depend on
proximity the distance of these shelters and so this is a seems like a cool pattern that we might
want to characterize because it could be really valuable in understanding the fish behavior and
of course these fish are valuable to the reef because they clean algae off the reef so we'd
love to get at this in a very quantitative way I'm measuring it actually with data and so we're very
lucky that some really cool new technology has become available and it's called structure from
motion technology basically allows you to swim over a three-dimensional object or walk over it or
wherever you are you can have a camera that gets a bunch of different perspectives of that object
in this software and there's various software software platforms available for this will render
a three-dimensional model for you so we played with this and we've been having some really cool
success so I wanted to show you guys what this is looking like and to tell you a little bit about
our plan which is ambitious to say the least so let me show you our coral model this is gonna
be a little bit difficult to show you but I think we'll be able to pull it off so here is a model of
a coral reef that we just generated and you zoom in a little bit zynga since we're just how amazing
this really is this is a about that's about 10 feet by about 40 feet so three by up there go
Siri nope don't want your help right now three yes like I said about 10 feet by 40 feet so three by
about 12 to 13 meters of reef and so you can see we have a three-dimensional representation of this
reef and it doesn't look particularly exciting right now because for one the visibility was not
phenomenal so it does look pretty monochromatic but there are definitely differences here you
can definitely readily identify live coral versus dead coral and bleaching patterns and these things
that we would really want to measure over time but for us in particular it allows us to actually very
carefully and very precisely measure how much structural refuge is available to these fish is
this affecting how they are socially interacting with others with other fish and so this is super
exciting that was one camera right so of course we're going to try to go big or go home because
we don't have a ton of time out here so our plan is to mount five cameras and I'm sorry
six cameras across five meters so about 17 18 feet long pole and swim over the reef with that
pole in a lawnmower pattern back and forth back and forth back and forth and we're doing this in
collaboration with our good buddies here Corsi and it's going to take it can take a village to pull
this off because it's quite ambitious and as far as I know and I have some friends actually that
introduced me to this technology that suggests that no one's ever attempted 3m all over this
scale so it's guys I said it's pretty ambitious let me just show you very quickly the pole that is
going to hopefully allow us to do this I'm going to disturb Heather for a second who's working on
data but here it is this is the end of it anyway we can't even sit it on our porch because it is
a massive piece of aluminum extrusion that we actually bolt together you can see and we mount
to this a GoPro video camera every meter instead this allows us to have this sort of massive area
that we're covering and we can basically map very large areas of coral reef with this in
three dimensions and use this for our research and for long-term monitoring to understand how
this system is responding to tourism which you can see is extensive right now so more soon