Furaha microdocumentary 1: The spiny desert slantie

Well, here we go: a Furaha microdocumentary. I gave it the number one, although that is not entirely accurate. I have made several videos in the past that might also be called 'Furaha microdocumentaries'. Those older videos reflected ideas about Furahan wildlife that are no longer current, with as the most obvious example the presence of ballonts. That is one reason to regard them as behind the times; another is that my new breed of microdocumentaries is of higher quality, or at least I like to think so. Finally, the new microdocumentaries tie in with the Furaha book and will hopefully increase sales. The Book is set to become available at the end of this month, October 2025, or next month. (The reason for the uncertainty is rather sobering: the books are printed in India and have to be shipped to the UK, but unrest in the Red Sea may cause a detour around Africa.)

  

Here it is! Blogger only shows videos at a rather small size, so I strongly recommend that you have a look at the video on my YouTube channel, where you should be able to see it in its full 1920 by 1080-pixel glory.

 I aim to produce more such videos, although they take a long time to produce. I thought beforehand that ray-tracing the images would take the most time, at three to five minutes per image for 24 images per second for something like a minute and a half. Although that amounts to about 144 hours, rendering can be done at night without paying much attention to the process. Programming the animals' movements takes devoted attention though, and that costs time, as witnessed by my previous post on such animations.             

If all goes as planned, there will be three or four microdocumentaries for each of the clades spidrids, cloakfish and tetrapters. Don't expect one every week! There will also be a general 'advertising video' out shortly.

As for the spiny desert slantie, its scientific name is Obliquambulator serratus. This is probably the first time I use the word 'slantie' in this blog; it occurs more often in The Book and represents a colloquial term for 'slanted spridrids', as described here first. In 'normal' spidrids, the legs move in a vertical plane and each leg segment is bilaterally symmetrical. In slanties, the plane of the leg is at an angle to the vertical and that angle is now part of the anatomy: slanties cannot in fact rotate their legs to become fully vertical. The slanting had no effect on leg shape early in slantie evolution, even though one side of the leg was now habitually up and the other side down. But later the legs segments evolved asymmetry, as shown clearly by the spines on the legs: these spines stick out in a horizontal direction, both on the top side and on the bottom side of the segments.

There is more to tell about slanties and spidrids. Making a video raises questions that paintings do not, such as whether the animals make sounds, what kind of sounds, and what they do, socially or otherwise. The video answers a few of those questions.