JessiCA
KENDALL-BAR

Animation by Jessica Kendall-Bar. Elephant seal illustrations by Danielle Dube through an Art-Science Residency with the Norris Center for Natural History. Music by Connor Vance. Read our article in Science Advances to learn more: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/12/eabd9818

Video abstract for submitted manuscript "Visualizing Life in the Deep: A Creative Pipeline for Data-Driven Animations to Facilitate Marine Mammal Research, Outreach, and Conservation." Paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9622956 Video Transcript: Have you ever wondered what marine mammals do beneath the surface? How about when they hear the sound of a predator, the rumbling of a ship above, or have just escaped a near-death encounter? Our new paper explains how we turn marine mammal tagging data into animations and sound to facilitate research, communication, and conservation. A critical first step of each collaboration included an iterative process of storyboarding, data sharing, and scriptwriting to refine our key messages and the target audience. We wrote scripts that use real data on position, orientation, swimming behavior, and heart rate to animate models of marine mammals, so that we can see and hear how they react to disturbances in their natural environment. Our 3D humpback whale animation uses tag data to reconstruct cooperative foraging behavior on the seafloor and demonstrate the potential harm of bottom-set fishing gear. Our 2D elephant seal animation follows a group of seals halfway across the Pacific as their decisions to forage and rest while avoiding predators shift in response to their internal and external environments. For our newest 3D animations, we created two custom tools that allow us to see and hear the impact of a disturbance. First, we built swim controllers for rigged 3D models that take raw accelerometer data and generate an animation of realistic swimming behavior to the beat of the data, alternating between swimming and gliding. Next, we wrote a script that synthesizes a soundtrack from electrocardiogram data of deep-diving marine mammals. When they get scared, animals respond with an increase in heart rate, vigorously pumping blood through their body so that they can run away at top speed. But let’s listen to the beating heart of a narwhal as he runs away after being entangled in fishing gear. At an extremely low 2.9 beats per minute, it reveals a physiological paradox- where its heart and body are at odds. Learning more about responses like these can teach us how marine mammals respond to disturbances in their natural habitat, and how we can work to mitigate those disturbances to protect them. We argue that by equipping biologists to leverage powerful industry animation tools, we can expedite complex data analysis, promote science communication outcomes, foster empathy and compassion for the natural world, and better serve the ecosystems we aim to protect. We invite you to learn more, download sample scenes, and learn to visualize your own data through interactive tutorials on: Our webpage: https://www.jessiekb.com/artforscicomm and Github: https://github.com/jmkendallbar/VisualizingLifeintheDeep

Immerse yourself in the surreal realm of underwater dreams, where kelp fronds refract the sun's rays and curious seals weave in and out of the underwater forest. This animation shows the adventure of an aquatic explorer who meets a fur seal companion beneath the waves. Later, the woman dreams of the same encounter, but from the perspective of the fur seal. She dreams of what it must be like to sleep like a fur seal, contorted at the surface with three flippers above the water, with one flipper lazily paddling to maintain this posture. She imagines opening just one eye, directed towards the water, to survey the aquatic realm for danger in the form of predators or fellow seals. She imagines that this eye is wired to the half of her brain which is on the other side of her body. She imagines that this half of the brain is awake and vigilant, while the other half of the brain lazily drifts in and out of consciousness. As the fur seal, she awakens herself as she slips into the water and later again as she playfully blows a bubble. Fur seals, like sea lions, have a remarkable way of sleeping. They can adapt to their environment. When they sleep on land, they sleep with both halves of their brain, much like ourselves as well as the family of true seals (Phocidae) including elephant seals and harbor seals. But, when they have to sleep in the water, they sleep like dolphins and whales, with only one hemisphere of their brain at a time. When they sleep in the water, they sleep in this jughandle posture and have one open eye directed to the water (contralateral to the waking hemisphere) and one closed eye directed to the air (contralateral to the sleeping hemisphere). Read our latest paper, where we observed this pattern for the first time: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0217025 The digital version of this animation will be burned onto film in the next few days and mounted on a "morphoscope" (with a hand-cranked frame advancer) with my custom woodburnings as decoration, prepared and assembled by Maya Diao and Roo for display at Burning Man 2019, where the theme this year is "Metamorphosis".