Roy Caldwell Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 5 of 8

Photography

Before we go on to talk about vision, you've talked about the lab, the facility which you're able to work in, but one of the things that I notice in visiting your lab and in some of the articles you gave me is that photography has become an important tool for you in doing you work. Tell us a little about that.

It's a way of seeing. A permanent way of seeing that's important to me. It's also a way of promoting my work, getting it well known. A picture is worth several thousand words, quite often. When I first started, I was no better than the average person with a Brownie. I really didn't know anything about photography at all. I was very lucky early in my career to work with a number of filmmakers who became fascinated with stomatopods.

By filmmakers you mean documentarians.

Yes. Natural history photographers and filmmakers. I worked with them, and just in the process of working with these people I picked up some tricks of the trade. I also saw what keen observers they were. They showed me a lot that I had never seen. They have a good eye. That's why they're doing what they're doing. So, by using some of the tricks that they used, learning a little about composition, about continuity of shots, about how to control light, gradually my photography increased to the point where it actually became fun, and I knew I could take a picture when I wanted to, of what I wanted to take.

Does that actually help you see the stomatopods?

Sure. Oh yeah. Very often I won't see something actually until I get the photograph back, or I get the film back or the video back, and I'll look at it and I'll see it doing something.

This project that we're going to be working on in the Aquarius next month totally serendipitously came out of taking pictures. We had known for a long time that stomatopods could see polarized light. In fact they can see three different e-vectors of polarized light, much more than we can even with a pair of sunglasses. But we didn't know what they used it for. There were ideas that maybe they used it for navigation or they used it to enhance contrast, but we just didn't know. And, as luck would have it, a couple of years ago, one of my former students and I caught a species of stomatopod in Lembeh Straight in northern Sulawesi. I brought them back to Berkeley. They are gorgeous, colorful little animals, and I wanted to get some good photographs of them. I put one in a tank and I was trying to get a photograph of it and it had a light reflection. I couldn't get rid of it, and so I grabbed a polarizing filter and put it over the camera lens and was looking and rotating the filter, and it was one of these times when you just can't believe what you're seeing. The front end of the animal has two large flaps which are called antennal scales. They were lighting up, red and purple and clear and white as I rotated it. It just went back and forth. Here was an animal which had a polarized display. I don't know of any other animal that has that. It's closely related to one of the species that lives underneath the Aquarius, and I had a few of those from our last mission. So I ran next door in the lab, grabbed a polarizing filter. Same thing! Different pattern, but it was using polarized light as well. And so now we're going to go back and study how they actually use it and what they are doing with it.

Next page: Vision in the Stomatopods

© Copyright 2001, Regents of the University of California