Here is a timelapse video taken of the tide rising onto the pier for the last hour leading up to high tide this evening (high tide was 18:48 this evening). It was created by taking a picture every 5 seconds and then creating a movie from the images using Quicktime 7 (using over 700 images in total) – the ‘frame rate’ was 24 images per second of video.

Two years ago, during the summer, I went off to India for a week. I left instructions that my plants were to be watered regularly – I had herbs growing inside and lots of flowers growing in the back garden. As it turned out, the watering wasn’t much of an issue – it had been monsoon season in Galway the entire week I was gone. As soon as I arrived home, I did a little tour of all the pots to see how the plants were progressing. I had planted rosemary seeds several months earlier, and they had finally begun to sprout just before I left. I went over to where there were a cluster of pots, and looked for the rosemary plant , but all I could see was a pot of soil with nothing growing in it. Actually, there was one smudge of green. When I looked more closely, I could see that the green smudge was a fat little caterpillar, sleeping off a feed of freshly consumed rosemary. My first instinct was to squish the little fecker but then I thought that I might as well get some benefit from the situation. My basil plants had survived and when I left  a basil leaf in the pot beside the caterpillar, he promptly scoffed it. I put in another one – same result. I couldn’t get over  how fast he got through it.

Originally, I set up my Canon G9 compact camera which has a timelapse video setting on it. Alas, it tended to shut down after about 30 minutes of recording. So I set up a Canon 5D with a timelapse shutter-release and fed it another leaf. It took the caterpillar a couple of hours to get through it , and it occasionally takes a breather to help digestion, but there isn’t much of the leaf left at the end.

See the caterpillar timelapse video here.