The Surprising Ethereal Beauty of Insects Spreading Their Wings to Take Flight In Ultra Slow Motion

Adrian Smith of Ant Lab, who is also a scientist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, posted a fascinating ultra slow motion video that captured the surprising, ethereal beauty of unusual insects as they spread their wings and took flight. Each insect was filmed at an incredible rate of 3,200 frames per second, which was able to show a very nuanced view of this instinctive process.

300 million years ago, before birds, bats, and even pterodactyls insects were flying. They were the first animals to lift themselves into the air and they're still the most successful flyers on earth. I've been putting a bunch of insects on this little platform here and filming how they get themselves up into the air and off into their flights. I haven't really been doing this for any research purposes, I've just been trying to find the most interesting insects I could and film them in a way that I don't think anybody else has.

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A post shared by Adrian Smith (@dradriansmith) on Jul 20, 2020 at 10:34am PDT

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A post shared by Adrian Smith (@dradriansmith) on Jul 18, 2020 at 12:09pm PDT

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A post shared by Adrian Smith (@dradriansmith) on Jun 20, 2020 at 9:05am PDT

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A post shared by Adrian Smith (@dradriansmith) on May 29, 2020 at 10:02am PDT

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A post shared by Adrian Smith (@dradriansmith) on May 27, 2020 at 8:07am PDT

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A post shared by Adrian Smith (@dradriansmith) on Jul 9, 2020 at 7:49am PDT

via PetaPixel

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