Life: Fish

Part four of BBC’s marvelous nature documentary “Life” is all about fish! The opening shot? Oh ... my ... gawd ... !!! A surfer riding a wave, then the camera zooms out, until we can barely see the guy at the foot of a wave five or six times his height! Wow. Astounding! Naturally we are privileged to witness beautiful underwater shots of rich reefs and their even more vibrant habitants. I was gazing in amazement at sea dragons, sea horses, stargazers and stingrays off the coast of Southern Australia; flying fish soaring above the water on their elongated fins to evade their predators; the tiny rock-climbing goby intend on colonizing the waterfalls of Hawaii; mudskippers excavating deep burrows in the soft Japanese sediment to hide from predators and to lay eggs inside a sealed chamber; convict fish digging a labyrinthine underground tunnel work in the south western Pacific for an extended family of, well, juvenile convicts; the quarrelsome sarcastic fringehead fish aggressively defending his found shell along the colorful Californian coast from an attack by an octopus; a shoal of sailfish (the fastest swimmers of the seven seas) shown in slow motion catching a bait ball of sardines; various sharks and myriads of other fish. Simply stunning!