Pacificklaus Best of 2020
Despite 2020 being a kind of weird and not necessarily convenient-to-live-through year (George Orwell will rise from the grave if you call if for the millionth time “unprecedented” or “new normal”) I managed to produce quite some nice creative output, both popular science writing, photography, and videography.
Popular Science Writing
I really enjoy writing for “Die Furche”, an intellectual Austrian weekly. I always wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, and writing about Mars is the closest I managed to get. In fact no one gets to go to Mars on the current NASA mission, which uses a robotic probe to explore the planet. I wrote a pair of articles about this Perseverance Mars Rover mission, one about the challenges of landing the rover on Mars semi-autonomously, another one about the astrobiological mission of Perseverance – to find out if there is, or ever was bacterial life on Mars.
These articles are in Tscherman, which is a great language to write popular science in, consider studying it if you haven’t already done so or if you aren’t a native speaker. For my non-German-speaking friends, please enjoy this nice photo story about everyone’s favorite wrasse – the cleaner wrasse – which I published in Hakai:
Photography
I had some good success shooting both macro and wide-angle. I got this shot of a commensal goby (look here for exciting goby publishing news) on an elephant ear sponge in Mactan, Cebu province, Philippines. Look how well the goby matches its host, it is virtually invisible for predatory fish looking for a meal.
I also really enjoy this over-under shot (not easy) of Apo Island, taken during Silliman University’s 37th annual survey of the reefs of the island. Many thanks to my mate Rene for letting me tag along! It’s not easy to nail an over-under shot, since the two parts necessitate the same exposure settings, while often the top-side is much brighter. Very shallow waters work best for this photo technique.
View this post on Instagram
Videos
A video which I find very funny, and which got the 2nd highest number of views on YouTube of all the videos I uploaded is this little feature on a crab which lives in the anal sac of a sea urchin. I got some really good footage of this animal, and my mate Matt explains the proper scuba diving hand signals to point it out underwater. Funny, at least I think so. The crab videos were very hard to shoot, since the spines of the urchin confuse the auto-focus.
Most views, of all the videos I uploaded in 2020, got this nice shot of a sea cucumber breathing – through its ass. For some reason my most popular videos all have to do with echinoderm anuses.
Blog Posts
The blog post which was most popular this year was this one about photographing and videoing freshwater gobies. Not easy, but very rewarding. Negros, the island where I live, has several really pretty species of gobies in its rivers and creeks.
Tweets
Twitter can be a good platform for intellectual exchange between enthusiastic amateurs and academics of many fields. It’s a quick way to exchange new papers, ideas, thoughts and arguments. For me, that works well in fish biology, ecology, photography, and, to some degree, neuroscience. It can also be an arena for self-righteous ideologues to out-virtue signal and mob each other. I use it for the former purpose. How do you avoid the latter type of Twitter experience? Block nasty users and keywords liberally. I often found that Zuby’s razor – a piece of wisdom found on Twitter – gets it right:
To those unaware, ‘Zuby’s Razor’ is the theory that if someone has their pronouns listed in their twitter bio, there’s a 99% chance that they’re a weirdo.
— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) August 29, 2019
This was my most popular (in terms of shares and likes) tweet in 2020:
Blast from the past II: Blue swimmer #crab not being friendly to me, #Sydney, ‘Straya, 2014. pic.twitter.com/EuwzuYMs1V
— Klaus Stiefel (@Pacificklaus) December 26, 2020
Happy reading, viewing and watching – see you in 2021.
