Crittercam, a new exhibit at The Woodlands Xploration Station, takes visitors underwater with whales, across the Serengeti with lions and over the Antarctic glacier with penguins. Its unique animal-eye view gives us an unprecedented look into animal behavior – and the world they live in.

Greg Marshall is a scientist, inventor and filmmaker who has dedicated the last 20 years to studying, exploring and documenting life in the oceans. Funded by the National Geographic Society, philanthropic foundations and U.S. federal grants, Marshall created CritterCam not only as a scientific tool, but also a major collaborative research program engaging scientists worldwide. Over the last 15 years Marshall’s Remote Imaging Program has collaborated with over 30 scientific groups on over 50 different species.

Here, Greg answers a few of our questions about this amazing technology.

1. What inspired you to create Crittercam? Has it lived up to your expectations – or perhaps gone in a different direction from what you originally expected?

In 1986 I was diving off the coast of Belize for my graduate work when I encountered a shark.  The shark sidled up and casually swept around me before disappearing back into the mist, but in that brief encounter I noticed a remora suckled to its belly. 

In that moment it occurred to me how extraordinary it would be to be that remora and ride along with the shark.  I imagined that a small camera in a streamlined housing could mimic the remora and allow me to vicariously observe the sharks behavior and ecology over time and through that alien space without the disturbing presence of a human observer. 

I had just built an underwater housing for a small camcorder and proceeded to reconfigure it into the closest thing to an electronic remora I could devise.  The resulting package looks like a monstrosity today, but when I strapped it to a captive turtle in a tank, the turtle simply ignored its backpack and behaved normally.  This was the important test that showed me the concept had merit.

photo credit: modean987

I wrote a concept paper of the different components my electronic remora should have and over the years, continuously strived to make the package smaller, lighter and more powerful.  Now, more than twenty years later, my electronic remora has shrunk to about the size of a flashlight.  It can withstand pressures of 1,000 meters, is controlled by a sophisticated onboard microprocessor and is capable of recording a suite of environmental and geospatial data.  Collaborating with experts around the world, my team and I have deployed Crittercams on over 50 marine species.  So, it has lived up to my expectations in many ways.

In other ways, it has surpassed them.  I conceived of Crittercam as a scientific tool, a way of studying animal behavior in places people access.  What I didn’t expect was the tremendous attraction the resulting images hold for people.  Every time we deploy, Crittercam brings home the animal’s point-of-view… a perspective that allows people to connect with the animal and its struggles to survive.  It’s this empathic experience that I didn’t necessarily expect when I invented Crittercam and that we have been able to share through many National Geographic films – and the Crittercam exhibit.

A penguin shows off his Crittercam.

2. What was the biggest challenge you faced in developing Crittercam? Are there particular animals that take to wearing the cameras better than others? What animals presented the biggest challenges?

Initially, the biggest challenge was to convince anybody that the concept had merit.  I had the initial inspiration in 1986 and at the time video cameras were relatively huge.  Whenever I would talk about the idea, people would look at me like I was nuts.

Wild animals don’t seem to react to the systems…I think they are simply too busy dealing with much more significant things that impact their lives, like finding food, avoiding predators or engaging in mating activity.  But some species are easier to work with than others.  Sharks and whales, for example, never leave the water and therefore the challenge lies in finding them, approaching them and encountering them long enough to attach a Crittercam.  Seals, turtles and penguins make it somewhat easier since they return to land to raise their young, so we can wait for them to come to us.

The hardest animals we have deployed Crittercam on are leopard seals.  These are large, predatory seals that live in the Antarctic pack ice.  They are solitary and widely spaced, so they are hard to find, hard to approach, hard to sedate and just plain hard to work with.  It took us six months to conduct one deployment.  But despite the challenge, leopard seals also embody the reason we do this work:  their world is melting, yet we do not know the simplest things about them. 

We are changing this planet, we need to understand the impact our behavior has on the creatures we share this planet with so we can protect their future – and our own.

3. What contributions has Crittercam technology made to our understanding of animal behavior? What is the most surprising thing you have discovered through the use of this technology?

Collaborating with scientists around the world, we have deployed Crittercams on whales, sharks, sea turtles, seals, penguins, sirenians and fish.  We’ve also now evolved the concept from sea to land and have worked with lions, tigers and bears. 

A leash with a lens: Crittercam on a female lion.

What the system captures during deployment on wild, free-ranging animals is data from the animal’s point of view, insights into their fundamental behavior and ecology.  This data helps us to understand how the animals function in their environment.  We publish in peer-reviewed journals, and our papers are read by like-minded scientists who can use these published results to help impact management decisions.

In an ongoing research collaboration with NOAA we discovered the endangered Hawaiian monk seals‘ critical foraging habitat.  Not only did we capture animal-borne imaging data that fundamentally changed our understanding of the animal and what it needs to survive, but as a by-product of the research we produced the PBS Special “Hawaiian Monk Seals:  Surviving Paradise”, raising awareness about an endangered species few people even know exist.  In collaboration with SCRIPPS, we deployed Crittercams on emperor penguins and experienced – for the first time ever – how they hunt and feed under the ice.  We told that story in “Emperors of the Ice”, another PBS Special, and used some of these same images in the Oscar winning feature film “March of the Penguins.”  These and our other films are geared for a lay audience but carry a strong conservation message. 

Our ultimate objective is to inspire people to care… because that is, after all, the only way we’ll ever do the hard work of conversation. 

4. How does the technology continue to develop, and what kind of testing is involved? Are there any animals that could not wear Crittercam? How did you make sure that the cameras are safe for animals to wear?

As technology progresses so does Crittercam.  I have a dedicated team at National Geographic and we are constantly working to make the systems smaller, more robust and more powerful.  The smaller the package, the smaller the species we can work with.  The more data we can record, the more we learn about the animals. 

Before we ever deploy systems on animals, we need to test them.  As a matter of principle, we thoroughly test each system comprehensively on the bench before deploying on an animal.  My lab at National Geographic has a pressure chamber, so we can ensure the system integrity down to 3000 meters.  After the systems pass the bench and lab tests, we can start deployments on animals in controlled settings.  One of my favorite test subjects is my six-year old son, Connor.  He is a young, active mammal and loves to put new Crittercams through their paces.  You can check him out on the National Geographic Kids site under “Connorcam.” 

When I deployed that first Crittercam prototype on a turtle, I had no idea whether it would be safe for the animal or not.  I didn’t know what her reaction would be and was prepared to remove the system immediately if she seemed disturbed.  But she didn’t seem to react at all.  With every new species we work with, we have to make this same assessment. 

The good news is that I’ve been developing animal-borne imaging for over 20 years now.  There were many things I didn’t know when I started out and that I had to learn by just doing and either failing or succeeding.  Over the years, my team and I have built on those experiences and today’s systems and deployment methods are based on principles we proved along the way.

Coming soon to Crittercam: bugs-eye view. photo credit: HVargas

At the moment, some species are still too small to carry Crittercam.  I’d love to deploy on smaller penguins, but to accomplish that we’ll have to shrink the system more.  People also keep asking about insect cams.  Same story there – it’ll just take time, but it will happen and it will be an amazing perspective. 

5. What do you hope people will discover at the Crittercam exhibit?

I hope people will discover and be as excited as I am about this new perspective on the world.  We are more and more isolated from the wild and the fact that we share this planet with many other living things.  Crittercam provides a connection to other creatures, a way of seeing the world from an animal’s point of view.  I hope people who visit the exhibit will learn something about animals and the challenges they face, but first and foremost I hope they’ll discover in themselves an empathy with these animals as they swim with sharks, dive with whales and stalk with lions.  And I hope this experience can help spark an inspiration to care and conserve these animals and the habitats they depend on and call home.

Greg Marshall is a two-time Emmy Award winner for cinematography and sound, for the National Geographic Specials “Great White Sharks” (1995) and “Sea Monsters: Search for the Giant Squid” (1999). He has created, produced or executive produced more than 70 natural-history-themed conservation films. See the results of his groundbreaking research in Crittercam, now on display at The Woodlands Xploration Station.