More timelapse treats inspired by nature

Here at Earth-Touch, we love a good timelapse. As a species, humans are locked into perceiving the world in a way that’s determined by our feeble senses and the unwavering progression of time on our human scale. Timelapse videography allows us overcome these limitations by letting us choose the perception “speed”.

If you were to spend a sunny afternoon strolling through a temperate forest, you might easily be fooled into thinking that it’s a static environment, an unimpeded paradise for both flora and fauna. Yet when viewed in a timescale that’s not generally perceptible, nature’s perpetual struggle for existence can be observed in all its stark detail.

After watching these beautiful images of nature from the BBC Motion Gallery, who could argue that something as seemingly static as a plant settled on the forest floor is not a respiring, moving, reactionary individual? The daily pulsing of leaves as they are “inflated” incrementally during the daylight hours is something we can never experience with our own eyes. Nor could we admire the gentle unfurling of a mushroom’s netted “skirt”.

What about the strange “creeping” behavior of the evolutionary oddity that is the slime mould? Neither plant nor fungus, these bizarre organisms appear to the untrained eye to be nothing more than brightly colored fungi. Yet when we compress time, we see them behave in a truly remarkable (and “un-fungi”) fashion. As they seethe across the substrate, they extract nutrients from any sort of decaying matter, and then, as if signalled by some unseen conductor, the individual cells reorganize themselves into small, vertical, “snotty” columns in order to release spores into the faster-flowing air just above ground level. All this effort simply to sire the next generation some distance away from the parent organism.