I have recently been experimenting with some time lapse movies of Aseroe rubra stinkhorns emerging from their eggs. I have not observed them emerging before and didn’t know how long they take to start emerging, and then once they do emerge, how long they take to form. So at first I had two cameras set up taking stills with the stinkhorn eggs in plastic trays in my kitchen. I left the light on overnight. Next morning one of the eggs had opened.I checked on the camera – the stills had been turned into a movie and it seemed OK. For the other eggs nothing much had happened, so I reset the cameras and left one camera to continue taking photos of another egg that was partly open. Nothing happened till later the next day. Here the resulting video is very poor – as the lighting changed a lot during the day as sunlight shone in at times.
Here is the resulting video on YouTube –
The first section was filmed using one frame per minute, with the camera set up overnight. The stinkhorn continued growing after I stopped filming – and I should have let it continue longer. The stinkhorn took 3-4 hours to emerge,and then probably grew after that for another few hours. The second one was filmed at one frame per 10 seconds. This seems too slow. I think a better frame rate may be one frame per 20 – 30 seconds.
