Researcher Nickolay Hristov
The video is mesmerizing. Synchronized with dramatic background music, we watch as a half-million living things swarm toward us. It feels like watching small fish undersea, but it’s actually bats emerging from a cave in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico.
Filmed with infrared thermal cameras, the method provides a groundbreaking opportunity to count bat populations, says Nickolay Hristov, assistant professor of life sciences at Winston-Salem State, who captured the video with Thomas Kunz of Boston University as part of Hristov’s post-doctoral work in thermal imaging.
“Bats are very difficult to study, which makes it a challenge,” Hristov says.
Challenges clearly appeal to Hristov, who also serves as a design researcher at the Center for Design Innovation, a new collaborative effort of WSSU, UNC School of the Arts, and Forsyth Technical Community College. At the center, Hristov is pursuing motion imaging, the multi-disciplinary effort to describe and study how organisms, including humans, move. (Watch for a more indepth look at Hristov and the center’s work in an upcoming issue of RamPages.)
Hristov and Kunz’s video of the Carlsband Caverns bats was posted at The Scientist: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/infrared-video-500000-bats-emerge-from-cave/. Their next step will be to film with multiple cameras so that the scientists can pinpoint the precise positions of the bats during flight, Hristov says.
