Support our video The Secret of the Drying Stream in the Czech Polymath competition
In a short video, Petr Pařil reveals the secrets of a hydrobiologist's work in the period when watercourses are drying up. He also introduces you to the DryRivers app, with which you too can map drying streams.
The Czech Polymath Popularization Video Competition
The Czech Polymath (Český Vševěd in Czech) 2023 is a popularization competition of the Night of Scientists, whose main goal is to introduce Czech scientists and their workplaces to the public. This year, the competition is starting right now at the end of May. Who will win the title Czech Polymath 2023? You can decide by casting your vote. You can vote for the video of Petr Pařil from our faculty until 15 October 2023 here.
Short video without a single cut
The requirement of the competition is to make a video of maximum 2,5 minutes long, without a single cut. This puts a lot of demands on the filming, and especially on the protagonist, because every overcut or other distraction (in our case it was a passing nursery or the snapping of a dry branch😊) means a new shooting. But in the end, it worked. We filmed the video at the end of April on the drying stream Čertík, which can be found between the Bohunice University Campus and Anthropos.
A disaster for aquatic life is a chance for terrestrial life
DRY − this phrase puts changing climate more and more emphatically into our vocabulary. Dried up small stream beds are becoming a normal part of our lives, turned upside down by extremes of weather. As Central Europeans, we know that a river is supposed to be full of life. Yes, you are right that the water bugs, familiar from Ferda the ant for example, will suffer considerable damage from drought and only the hardiest will survive. But let's take a look at the SECRETS of these new rocky paths from a landlubber's perspective in our video. On the other hand, isn't a dry riverbed a chance for terrestrial invertebrates, plants or even large mammals?
It is these two questions, which aquatic animals survive in drying watercourses and what creatures replace them in arid waterways, that Petr Pařil is seeking to answer in his research. And believe me, he often finds unexpected surprises. What are they? That's the SECRET he'll be happy to reveal in the competition...
