EcoMotion studios celebrates Robert Paine’s Pisaster experiments

Back at the Evolution 2014 meeting I encountered the great “Drift” animated short, which I still use in my evolution course. Well the producers of that short have formed ECOmotion Studios, and they have made a bunch more videos in honor of the Ecological Society of America‘s centennial.

This one is a fun “spoken word” jam that does a great job of describing Robert Paine’s seminal work on the effect of predators on community diversity. I like how the 1960’s animation and poetry aesthetic was used to bring out the time period in which this work was done. Although the narrative approach here is pretty straight-forward, I imagine that students would find the visuals here to be really valuable in understanding the nature of Paine’s important experiment.