lookit them li’l doozers scoot!

We have a lot of tiny snails in the aquarium. The loaches are supposed to eat them, but the tank was snail-free for a long time, and I suspect the loaches have forgotten that these little nodules are tasty.

The snails don’t seem to move much; so little, in fact, that I was convinced that they just basked in the filter’s outflow, and let food come to them. To test this hypothesis, I set up a tripod, my trusty Canon PowerShot loaded with CHDK, and used an intervalometer to take an image every ten seconds for a total of a hundred images. Here’s the result, speeded up 100x:

Plain link (MPG): snails.

Those little dudes really do bop about, if you consider things from their timescale.

How I made this: I renamed the jpeg files 001.jpg … 100.jpg, then ran the command:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i %03d.jpg -r 10 -s vga -b 1200k snails.mp4