Great Animated GIFs of Science

I ran across this animated GIF of C. elegans on the move while putting together the previous post on optogenetics. It’s the work of Bob Goldstein of the University of North Carolina’s biology department, who has created a large body of microphotographic cinema. This little looping movie of a sinuous nematode seems nearly the perfect marriage of format and subject: the winking, primitive, robust genre of the animated GIF; an ancient, simple, vermiform specimen of multicellular life. It’s as if C. elegans had swum down through the aeons to intersect with an image-making format precisely engineered to express its particular qualities.