In short order, this rapidly forming ridge will enclose the beginnings of the nervous system. Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo ArkĪnother 45 seconds into the film, and you can see the neural plate rising off of the embryo. “So what we’re looking at here is the prospective anus of this salamander.”Īn ensatina salamander ( Ensatina eschscholtzii eschscholtzii). This is where your gut tube is going to start to form,” says Hurney. “This is a process that’s essential for vertebrates, called gastrulation. This is what’s known as the formation of the blastopore. ( See a caterpillar transform into a butterfly.)įor instance, after about three days of development (and around the one-minute mark in the video), the salamander embryo begins to pucker and tuck into itself. “What’s also amazing to me is that it’s not terribly different from what happens with human embryos,” says Hurney, who is currently the director for the Center for Teaching and Learning at Colby College in Maine. “I was almost in tears watching that video,” says Carol Hurney, a biologist who has spent around 15 years studying salamander embryonic development. “But very rewarding.” The science of “Becoming” “It was very, very difficult,” says van IJken. Or he’d catch them, but the lighting would be off, or the shot out of focus.Īfter more than six months of filming and countless tweaks, van IJken was able to shrink what would take around four weeks in nature down to just six minutes of otherworldly beauty. Or a multi-day timelapse shot would be ruined because the developments he’d been hoping to catch were happening on the opposite side of the embryo, out of view. Often, van IJken arrived just moments too late. ( Watch a sausage-size larva transform into a beetle.) “It was quite complicated, because I wanted to capture the first cleavage,” he says, referring to the split second when the original, single cell of an organism divides for the first time. When a female laid a clutch of eggs and a male fertilized it, the breeder would call van IJken, who would then race over and begin filming through a microscope.
“So I started to do research and I found out that frog and salamander eggs are fully transparent.”įrom there, van IJken teamed up with an amphibian breeder who kept an extra-close watch on a captive population of alpine newts, which are a type of salamander. “My idea was to film the origin of life, the actual beginning of life,” says van IJken. Using a combination of time-lapse photography and video recording, he molded them into a powerful new film called “Becoming.” From the largest creature that’s ever existed-the blue whale-to the inch-long bumblebee bat, each of us can rewind our existence to the same humble foundation.Īmazingly, photographer and filmmaker Jan van IJken has captured these first fleeting moments. You, me, the lemurs in the trees, the snakes in the desert, and the squid in the deep sea-all of us began as a single cell.
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