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Thu 24 Jul 2008

Video clip of horseshoe crab rescue at Mandai mangroves

Category : marine

During the mangrove horseshoe crab yesterday, I had Kah Ming shoot this video clip with my Panasonic Lumix when Theresa and I were disentangling the crabs from the monofilament gill net. The battery ran out and I uploaded the film clip warts and all. The camera's output was a 718.2MB 640 x 480 mov file; within QuickTime, I used DivX export which reduced the filesize to 72.4MB - almost a 10 times reduction!

I uploaded this video to Vimeo since YouTube can't handle DivX formats yet and Google Video is experiencing some error which has them challenging the copyright on all my videos. Isn't it always nice to have alternatives and the means to distribute videos for free?

The horseshoe crabs appear dead so its important to check each individual. The scissors are very important as it eliminates the need to pull the filament against the limbs which can accidentally cut the animal! Just keep going snip, snip, snip after every filament joint and gently pull each cable one way or the other until it comes free with little resistance. An alert assistant able to work patiently with the persn doing the cutting can be invaluable! We later took out an additional, smaller scissors to tackle some very tough knots buried at the base of the animal's legs. Amongst the horseshoe crabs was a single, defensive forceps crab! We did lose count of the number released but hey, we were focusing on completing the release and the need to continue with our recce!

Posted at 4:46PM UTC by N. Sivasothi | permalink | email |