Holy Compost Cam Batman!

Approximately 500 images taken over 5 days, roughly once every 15 minutes. A 6.4" x 4.2" view panning down 11 inches of compost located in my backyard.

It surprises me how insanely active this is. My wife started the compost a few years ago and I'm not sure when we last emptied/sifted things. Towards the bottom half the soil/compost is shifted away from the scanner which puts it out of focus, but there's still tons of activity.

I'm capturing a full 8.5 x 11.5" area at 300 DPI and this video is panning vertically across a small portion of it. We've recently put in a bunch of cilantro, strawberry, carrot, and bits and pieces of leaks along with pieces of brown paper bag and potato skins. To be able to see all of this turn to soil would be fascinating!

Compost, Hypha Growth and Instructables

Almost done with the guide/instructable. I need to run through the whole thing one more time to see if all of it adds up properly. In the mean time I've buried two more scanners. The first one a few weeks ago was buried with a flower (pictured in prior post), the Canon LiDE 200 seized up after ~7,000 scans.

The second scanner (another LiDE 200) was buried in our compost bin a couple days ago, and today I started seeing hypha growth along the head of a strawberry that arrived yesterday. In about 8 hours the hypha grew ~6mm. Impressive! I wonder how much further it will grow.

I know very little about fungus, but I remember reading that some forms of fungus form hypha strands capable of ensnaring nematodes. Totally wicked, and would be amazing to capture. Though I'm not sure scanning at 600 or 1200 dpi would suffice. Some details on this here: http://botany-lab.blogspot.com/2015/03/arthrobotrys-carnivorous-fungus.html

Mmmmmmmmm.