BBC Oceans: Arctic Ocean

Only about 5% of the world’s oceans have been explored. This program has aimed at bringing the earth’s seas closer to home. In this last installment, the scientific exploration team takes us to the Arctic Ocean, one of the most hostile bodies of water on the planet – and naturally one of the least explored. Global warming, obviously, is changing this ocean dramatically. Already one and a half million square miles of the arctic ice cap have melted in the last thirty years. Paul Rose and Tooni Mahto dive beneath the polar ice cap to see what may be causing the ice cover to shrink – in addition to the increase of air temperature. What we learn is that the more ice melts, the more the surrounding water absorbs heat of the sun light, due to which the water temperature increases, thus causing the underside of the caps to melt from below. With the opportunity at hand, Lucy Blue and Philippe Cousteau Jr. take measurements of the thickness of the ice. Only caps as thick as six feet are likely to survive the summer. Their measurements confirm scientific calculations that much of the polar cap is less than six feet – and thus the loss of the ice cover is only going to accelerate in the near future. This is disconcerting to human survival, because the more ice is lost, the faster global warming will become. Perhaps already in 2013 the Arctic Ocean will be without ice during the summer. As all the world’s oceans are connected with the Arctic, currents will be effected, and thus the Earth’s climate patterns. The importance of the North Pole can thus not be overstated.

The receding ice cover certainly threatens animals who rely on it, and most vulnerable of all is the polar bear. Yet, just as important for the eco-system are the crustaceans near the bottom of the food chain on which even whales feed. The team is very fortunate to spot several dozen white Beluga whales around the fjords of Svalbard. Lucy also examines how humans have exploited these waters for centuries. She takes us to the remains of Smeerenburg (“blubber town”), Europe’s northernmost outpost on Spitsbergen, settled by the Dutch Northern Company in 1619 as a whaling station. Walruses, too, were nearly hunted to extinction for their fat. Now on Spitsbergen, the population has increased to about two thousand – and they may actually be benefiting from the rising temperatures. At the edge of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, Philippe and Lucy are surprised to find a colorful underwater Garden of Eden, of red soft corals and pink anemones, green kelp, as well as starfish and crab. Overall, I guess the Cricket has been too spoiled by David Attenborough’s amazing nature documentaries, because in comparison BBC’s Oceans is disappointing. Throughout the series the focus was very much on the four members of the team, which distracts from the natural beauty that allegedly is the show’s main subject. At times it was nearly impossible to make out what they were saying through their snorkels – nor do I know why we should care whether or not they have seen this species or that natural feature before. There were, to be sure, some beautiful and interesting scenes. And for that I am grateful.

BBC Oceans: Mediterranean Sea

The secrets of the earth’s oceans have remained largely undiscovered. Our oceanographic exploration team is trying to put the world’s oceans in a human scale. This time the expedition is headed for the Mediterranean, which last time the Cricket checked wasn’t technically an ocean, but we are informed it is in fact the remains of an ancient ocean. It is home to about ten percent of the planet’s marine life, Western civilization developed around its shores, and the hundred million visitors every year are having a profound effect on these waters. When maritime archaeologist Lucy Blue sets out to dive the remains of a Roman shipwreck, I was hoping for a site of a naval battle during the First Punic War, because they do take us to near the Egadi Islands (site of the war’s last battle in 241 BCE). Alas, all we get is a pottery field of amphorae. Truly incredible, though, is the footage of Paul Rose and Tooni Mahto seemingly flying through the clear water of an underwater cave beneath Mallorca. Spectacularly sculptural stalactites and stalagmites indicate that tens of thousands of years ago these caves were above the water line until the sea level rose and flooded them with salt water.

Around the submerged Ferdinandea volcano, created by the collision of the European and African continents, the team learns that industrial fishing has extinguished larger fish such as sardines and tuna – indicating that the entire eco-system may be at risk. Environmentalist Philippe Cousteau Jr. then inspects a blue-fin tuna farm. Glad as he is seeing these beautiful fish, he is obviously enraged, knowing how they are on the brink of extinction once again due to overfishing. Later, Philippe and the team search for the great white shark, as the Sicilian Channel is a nursery for its juveniles. But despite all their efforts they remain unsuccessful. In the Straits of Messina (where the First Punic War commenced), however, expedition leader Paul Rose is able to sight the prehistoric six-gill shark, the largest living predatory fish. And what a marvelous sight it is!

BBC Oceans: Indian Ocean - coastal waters

Oceans cover two-thirds of our planet, they hold clues to the mysteries of our past, and are vital for our future survival. That is the message this BBC nature documentary has been trying to get across. In this second installment about the Indian Ocean the focus is on the Spice Islands off Tanzania, on the edge of two continents, where the full force of the Indian Ocean collides with the African coast. These waters are a nursery supporting an enormous diversity of marine life. But the ocean’s currents can also cause unpredictably heavy weather (rain, storm, monsoons, cyclones), that can trigger floods, droughts and famine. The Spice Islands, moreover, are an intense meeting point of man and sea, particularly vulnerable to human impact. Starting at the north of the archipelago, Tooni Mahto and Paul Rose dive inside a submerged facture in the solid rock on the edge of Pemba Island, a fissure between the two continents. They find a recess teeming with life, where the inhabitants have adapted to living in the shadows. One example is green tree coral which does not contain algae, but feeds by filtering the food that the currents sweep into the passageway. At night, Tooni and Philippe Cousteau Jr assess the health of the coral reefs and find a wide variety of species, including large table corals, staghorn and pineapple corals. Naturally, environmental conservationist Philippe is visibly excited about the reef’s vibrancy. Off Zanzibar, the team takes coral core samples to create a data record of weather patterns that could help scientist predicting natural disasters.

Tooni and Paul then show us the marvelous land crabs, that are halfway between land and sea creatures with lungs and gills, lay their larvae in the water but live their adult life on land. Then Philippe and Tooni visit the mangrove lagoons around Mafia Island in search for the enigmatic sea horse in the lively waters teeming with juvenile scorpion fish, yellow box fish, tiny squid, and hermit crab. Sea horses have been heavily exported from Tanzania for the traditional eastern medicine market. They actually find the largest recorded specimen of its kind. On the west coast of the island, maritime archaeologist Lucy Blue dives with Paul to study the remains of the village of Ras Kisimani washed into the sea by a cyclone in 1872. Not only is the seaboard littered with nineteenth century local pottery, but she also discovers fifteenth-century Persian ware, as well as fourteenth century East Asian ceramics. The site was thus once a trading hub between Africa, Arabia and Asia. Finally, Philippe has the chance of a lifetime to swim with a group of whale sharks, the world’s largest fish. Not a bad episode, but not exceptional either.

BBC Oceans: Indian Ocean

This episode the oceanographic explorers take us to the waters of East Africa. First, marine biologist Tooni Mahto goes swimming with manta rays off the coast of Mozambique. These mantas suffer from shark bites, but remain healthy by taking advantage of the butterfly fish and moon wrasse that clean their wounded skin. Quite expectedly, environmentalist Philippe Cousteau Jr. investigates a threat to one of the ocean’s greatest predators – the shark (just as in the previous episode). Philippe and Lucy Blue look on as one fisher boat returns with several baby sharks. The fishermen cut off the fins, from which they’ll earn about $50 a day (in a country where an average day’s wage is a single dollar). Just this one boat catches about a thousand sharks in a year. Philippe is fuming with rage and disgust. All this just for shark fin soup!

The team then goes in search for the ever elusive dugong (sea cow). Tooni is visibly excited when they finally spot a group. Off Zanzibar, Philippe and Lucy inspect the health of the coral reefs only to find a great many sea urchins (again, just as in the Southern Ocean) and worse, the crown-of-thorns starfish that eats the coral alive. They visit a “coral nursery” where coral fragments are grown in a man-made underwater garden in hopes of reversing the reef’s decline. Maritime archaeologist Lucy Blue dives for the wreck of the Paraportiani that sank in 1967 (forced to circumnavigate Africa when the Arab-Israeli conflict closed the Suez Canal). She is particularly disturbed to find that many wrecks are not protected and are plundered for bronze scrap. They discuss the importance of archaeological sites, but show little sympathy for the plight and poverty of the locals. Overall, not a particularly impressive episode.

BBC Oceans: Atlantic Ocean

BBC’s underwater science program Oceans takes us to the Atlantic this time. First, marine biologist Pooni Mahti brings us to the Bahamas’ “Black Hole,” an isolated column of water mimicking chemically toxic conditions similar to the seas of three and a half billion years ago. After diving eighteen meters (60ft) deep through emerald green water, suddenly the temperature spikes by six degree centigrade (10F) and the water turns a cloudy shade of purple. The cause is a purple sulfur bacteria that traps the sunlight through photosynthesis, thus heating the water, and producing hydrogen sulfide. Below the purple cloud the water turns pitch black and the oxygen level is practically nil. The divers’ skin starts itching and they need to return to the surface out of safety precautions. From this “Black Hole” on the island of South Andros, we travel to Lee Stocking Island to investigate one of the oldest surviving life-forms on Earth. Stromatolites are almost lifeless seeming rocks formed by cyanobacteria that produce oxygen through photosynthesis. Their existence has made it possible for more complex life to develop.

Maritime Archaeologist Lucy Blue searches for clues of the lost civilization of the Lucayans, the pre-Columbian people inhabiting the Bahamas. (The arrival of the Europeans obliterated them by the tens of thousands.) In an underwater cave system she finds a neatly deposited skull that may be identified as Lucayan due to its flattened forehead. On another dive she finds the remains of the HMS Southampton, possibly the first true frigate, that was wrecked off Conception Island during the War of 1812 between the British Empire and the recently independent United States of America.

Quite naturally environmentalist Philippe Cousteau wishes to gauge the effects human activity has on the second largest water mass on the planet. He shows us the bad-guy poster-child of invasive species: the beautiful lionfish (popular in aquariums), which belongs in the Pacific Ocean, not in the Bahamas. This ornate creature has neurotoxic venomous glands on its fin’s spines, but more problematically, without a natural predator around, it is free to prey and wipe out the native fish stock, spreading fast from the Caribbean all the way north to Rhodes Island. Additionally, commercial fishing has practically annihilated some species of fish by 95%, most significantly endangered is the shark. (Anywhere between seventy to a hundred million sharks are caught per year – mostly as accidental by-catch!) The team participates in several experiments to test shark repellents that may save the oceans’ shark population from extinction.

Maybe because I’m getting used to the formula, maybe because I’m getting to know the individuals better, maybe because my expectations were so low about the Atlantic Ocean, I have to say there were some pretty interesting moments in this episode.

BBC Oceans: Red Sea

The team of BBC’s Oceans travels to the Southern Red Sea, an area of mostly uncharted territory, inhabited by a wide and colorful variety of species. First we sail to Djibouti to discover how oceans are formed as tectonic plates shift away from each other. Oceanographer Tooni Mahto and environmentalist Philippe Cousteau take us deep inside the rift between Africa and Arabia. As excited I am sure they must be, for me, all I can think is, so what? Not very spectacular viewing. Off the coast of Eritrea, maritime archaeologist Lucy Blue goes in search evidence of early human activity when our ancestors first went out of Africa across the globe. Around a raised coral reef she finds a flaked hand blade and other tools made from obsidian dating from the middle Paleolithic as well as oyster shells tossed together after a meal some hundred and twenty five thousand years ago.

We then discover that the coral reefs in the Red Sea are thriving despite the rising temperatures in what is already one of the warmest seas on Earth. They speculate that heat resistant algae are keeping the coral vibrantly healthy. Another extraordinary phenomenon is the florescent pigmentation of some corals which perhaps functions as a filter to screen out certain wavelengths of sunlight. From Eritrea we are taken to Sudan to explore the wreckage of the Umbria, an Italian cargo ship. At least we are offered a stirring bit of modern history. The captain deliberately sank the ship on the day Italy declared war on Britain so as to protect her secret cargo: not the thousands of wine bottles, not even the cars on board, but the five thousand five hundred and ten tons of explosives to be used against the Allies in World War II. Next, Philippe makes an emotional journey to the remains of an underwater village his grandfather Jacques Cousteau built in 1963. Actually only the submarine’s garage is all that is left. Finally expedition leader Paul Rose dives for sharks and finds gray reef sharks, barracudas, sail fish, silky shark, and on the last day of the voyage a school of about thirty hammerheads. A little disappointing they didn’t get any closer to show them in their natural glory.

BBC Oceans: Southern Ocean

In the second installment of BBC’s nature documentary Oceans, Paul Rose and his team of marine explorers travel to Tasmania to investigate why certain parts of the Antarctic Ocean are warming twice as fast as the rest of the world’s oceans. The Southern Ocean may offer a glimpse into the future of life on Earth – the impact of global warming and climate change. The most evident sign of this phenomenon is the decimation of Tasmania’s giant kelp forests over the past decade to mere patches of hardly five percent their former size. The rise in sea temperatures is itself a major cause, but the team discovers that another perpetrator is the sea urchin – an invasion that has devastated the environment into a barren rocky wasteland. The disappearance of these forests threatens the rich biodiversity normally sustained by kelp and endangers the habitat of the elusive weedy seadragon. We learn that a shift in the East Australian Current brings warm water from the equator farther south than before. Part of a solution to the problem may be the reintroducing of rock lobsters (crayfish) as they prey on sea urchins.

The Antarctic Ocean not only offers a glimpse into the future, it also offers a glimpse into the past. A network of sea caves, namely, contain fossils of ancient shell fish who lived some 300,000 million years ago, which are identical to specimen found across the ocean in Antarctica. Tasmania, in other words, broke off the Southern Pole. Furthermore, strong currents and roaring storms have taken many victims so that the ocean bed is littered with thousands of shipwrecks off Tasmania alone. In the southwestern Sunken Valley, tannin in the surface water from the peat soil filters sunlight, which allows creates to thrive in conditions otherwise found over a thousand feet deep, such as sea whips and sea pens. The team, moreover, discovers that Maori octopuses get stranded by the dozens every year in the secluded Eaglehawk Bay as the access to the open sea is blocked off by a small strip of land. As an extra treat the team dive with fur seals that were once hunted to the brink of extinction, but are now recovering in vigorous colonies on Tasman Island. As informative as the program is, the Cricket is still annoyed by the so-called “human dimension” of the show. More marvelous marine life, please, and less talking heads.

BBC Oceans: Sea of Cortez

In 2008, BBC Two ran an eight part nature documentary series about the world’s oceans. The first episode is about the Gulf of California, or Sea of Cortez. The story begins with the near disappearance of hammerhead sharks in the region – wiped out by commercial fishing (mostly for shark fin soup marketed in Asia). But sad as that certainly is, a sea of change is taking place naturally. The dolphin population has increased, and sea lions are thriving after the local colony has adapted to fishing in deeper waters now that the sardines have thinned out. More threatening is the growing presence of the cannibalistic predatory Humboldt squids, who’ve mastered hunting in packs. Yet that presence has attracted large numbers of sperm whales who no longer need to migrate (at least not the females) in order to survive. The program also includes images of the hydrothermal vents along the San Andreas Fault, as well as the wreckage of Chinese vessel once smuggling immigrant workers to the us now becoming an artificial coral reef. The team includes expedition leader Paul Rose, maritime archaeologist Lucy Blue, maritime biologist Tooni Mahto, and environmentalist Philippe Cousteau (the grandson of Jacques Cousteau). While I mean no personal offensive – Mahto and Cousteau are definitely photogenic – the show focuses too much on them rather than on the beautiful wonders that are the program’s subject.

Planet Earth: Great Plains

Somehow it escaped my notice that I missed an installment of Planet Earth, namely the seventh episode, entitled “Great Plains.” David Attenborough authoritatively informs the audience that the great irony about the earth’s open plains is that, while they seem at first to be eerily empty and quiet, they support the greatest gatherings of wild life on the planet. The reason for this is grass, which covers a quarter of the world’s land. The Central Asian steppe alone extends one-third of the globe. Bear in mind, though, that the inhabitants of the open plains are exposed to the elements – thunder and rain, wildfires, dust swirls and scorching heat or the arctic conditions of the tundra. The Great Plains, moreover, witness some of the largest migration on the planet. For instance, in Outer Mongolia, two million gazelle gather so that the females can birth their young together out in the open. A similar number of wilder beast herd on the East African savanna. Annually, five million snow geese return from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian tundra. Nesting on the ground, they are an easy prey for the Arctic fox, who steals eggs and buries some for later. Further south, wolves prowl the tundra hunting for caribou in the vast emptiness.

But the most numerous migration on land must be the swarm of one and a half billion Red-billed Quelea birds that flock over Africa’s savanna. On the North American prairie, bison have returned in large numbers, after human hunting had nearly driven the wild animal to extinction. Among colorful summer flowers on the grasslands of South Africa live ostriches and antelopes, while the long grass plains of India is home to elephants and rhinoceros, as well as pygmy hogs. The highest open plains is the Tibetan Plateau, home of the wild yak and wild ass, the pika (a relative of the rabbit, though it looks more like a chinchilla or hamster) and the Tibetan fox. The final sequence shows us African bush elephants marching through the parched savanna in search of a watering hole, which they must share with a pride of hungry lions. But, after a season of drought, rain will flood the plains and grass returns. Perhaps I have been spoiled by all the other marvelous nature documentaries I have recently seen, but I was not immensely impressed by this particular episode.

Life: Primates

Of the family tree of life, there is one branch that perhaps has the greatest fascination for us humans – and that’s the one on which apes and monkeys swing. This final installment of BBC Life explores the world of primates, some of the most intelligent, curious, social and quarrelsome in the animal kingdom. A troop of some 400 Hamadryas baboons encounter a rival troop in a violent clash on the Ethiopian plains, stealing females and settling old scores. Japanese Macaques, the most northerly living monkeys, have learned to evade the bitter winter cold by lounging in thermal springs of Yamanouchi Valley, a privilege held by females and their young. In the Congo, the silverback Gorilla warns off other males through vocalization and beating his chest, while spectral tarsiers, with their large eyes and large ears, communicate with piercing calls to warn against danger and to return stragglers. Ring-tailed Lemurs in Madagascar use scent not only to mark their territory but also to prepare for mating, as males approach a female in heat by waiving their furry tail rubbed with odor.

Female Phayre’s leaf monkeys help rear each other’s young as long as it retains its bright orange fur. A female orangutan will raise her young for nine years by passing on the skills to survive in the rainforest of Sumatra. The most southerly living non-human primates are the chacma baboons of the South African Cape Peninsula, who collect shark eggs among seaweed on the lowest tide. White-face capuchins hammer clams on mangrove roots along Costa Rica’s coast to exhaust the muscle and the shell opens, while their cousins, brown-tufted capuchins in Brazil, use hammer stones as tool to crack open palm nuts. However, our closest ancestor, the Chimpazees have improved their tool use even further. For, in West African Guinea, they dip twigs to gather ants, strip palm leaves as pestle to crack the nutritious palm heart, and use stone anvils on which to crack nuts without breaking the kernel. I hardly need to repeat that I adore this show. It’s a pity this was the last episode, but it certainly was a worthy end to one of the most excellent nature documentaries ever produced.

Life: Plants

In the struggle for survival plants are perhaps even more inventive than animals devising solutions to the challenges of life. Unlike all other living creatures, plants require light to thrive – due to photosynthesis. While the rainforest would seem the most prosperous place for plants to live, they need to grow from the shades of the forest floor toward the light beyond the canopy. And if you cannot grow, you must climb, using adhesive pads or sharp claws or swirling coils. While bamboo can grow some 90 feet in just as many days, bristlecone pines grow over centuries at altitudes of several thousand feet – some being as old as five thousand years, the oldest living things on earth. To feed, the sundew uses sticky droplets on its tentacles to ensnare mosquitoes emerging from boggy waters, while the venus flytrap locks insects within their clambshell leaves. In the Antarctic cold of Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain, the richea produces nectar in the sun’s warmth to lure birds into pollinating the flowers. Even cleverer is the sandhill milkweed in the spring meadows of Florida, which defends itself from the onslaught of monarch caterpillars by spilling latex drops from its veins; yet once they pupate into butterflies, they, too, cannot resist the flowers’ nectar. But the most manipulative of plants enslave their pollinators, like the heliconia in Dominica, which forces the purple-throated Carib hummingbird, with its long curved beak to return time and again, by carefully rationing the amount of nectar.

They say the apple never falls far from the tree, but plants have contrived ingenious strategies for dispersing their seeds – so as to avoid competing with their offspring for space (think of helicopter seeds). The brunsvigia is carried along by the wind, stem and all, cartwheeling across the South African desert and casting about seeds. In Borneo, the alsomitra produces a ball-sized pod with seeds that glide hundreds of feet through the air on wafer-thin wings. The saguro cactus can survive the extreme conditions of Arizona’s Sorona desert by flowering in the cool of the night to attract bats, while its sweet fruits attract doves, tortoise and ants that will disperse its seeds miles away. On Socotra Island in the Arabian Sea, dragon blood trees survive with their bizarre shape (a thick trunk with branches that wave out in an upside down parasol) as their leaves catch drops of the occasional morning mist; while the desert rose has a hardy bulbous trunk that stores water. Mangroves can even stand the saltwater tides because their warty pores filter most of the salt and breathe in air when they are exposed. And grasses have created such a bond with one particular animal, that human civilization would have been impossible without wheat and rice. The entire episode is a feast of variegated hues, sunflowers, foxgloves, bromeliads and orchids. To capture the life of plants, the program uses extraordinary time-lapse photography, sometimes inventing new techniques in the process. And as a bonus, the backdrop features stunning footage of starry desert nights and aurora borealis. Truly, this is a must watch!

Life: Creatures of the Deep

Life on Earth began in the Ocean Deep – and some of the most ancient life forms on our planet are marine invertebrates, the topic of this installment of the most astonishing nature documentary so far produced. We return to the hydrothermal vents (seen in Planet Earth) around which it all began. It is there that Pompeii worms survive the scalding, volcanic heat, together with white crabs and enormous tube worms. When krill rise up at night from the abysmal depth to the surface in the Sea of Cortez off Mexico to feed on plankton, they attract shoals of predatory sardines that in turn attract hundreds of Humboldt squid that herd the fish as a pack and grab their meal with dangerous tentacles. Underneath the Antarctic sea ice in springtime life flourishes in a colorful garden of starfish, sea urchins, and nemertean worms. A sight so incredible, it’s almost unearthly! Then there’s the huge fried-egg jellyfish hunting among a swarm of 100,000 Aurelia jellyfish, using its tentacles like harpoons to catch prey. Another amazing scene shows hundreds of thousands of armor-plated spider crabs marching to the shallows off South Australia to molt their old shells and to mate enthusiastically while they’re together in such vast numbers. But then they are under threat from a stingray that is so choosy it only catches the softest shelled crabs.

The highly intelligent cuttlefish (who have the largest brain size relative to its body among invertebrates), the chameleons of the sea, can quickly change the color of their skin, flashing different colors, not just as warning or camouflage, but also deception – for instance to mimic the color of a female, confusing a larger male, and allowing the smaller one to mate on the sly. We also revisit the 14-ft. Pacific giant octopus off the coast of British Columbia that sacrifices her life caressing her only hatch of a hundred thousand eggs to protect them from algae and fish. The struggle for survival proves itself, again, when a large sun-starfish feeds on her deceased body, gets trapped by spiny sea urchins, and comes under attack from a king crab that amputates one of its arms. In sheer awe, we witness a coral reef forming around the rusty hulk of a shipwreck, feeding and fighting, and spawning after the November full moon. The program ends with the most wondrous splendor of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on earth. I can only repeat myself: watch the series!

Life: Hunters & Hunted

With the next episode of BBC Life we return to the world of mammals, focusing this time on the struggle for survival, the never-ending fight between predator and prey. David Attenborough informs us that because most hunts actually fail, what makes mammals so remarkable is their adaptability, their ability to continually devise and revise new strategies. We revisit some favorite scenes, such as the three cheetah brothers hunting together for zebras and ostrich at the foot of Mt. Kenya; the bottlenose dolphins corralling a shoal of leaping fish by stirring up rings of mud in Florida Bay; chital deer and gray langur monkeys warning each other in Bandhavgarh, India, of an imminent attack by a Bengal tiger. It’s a great pleasure to see these beautiful scenes again.

Nevertheless, the new footage in this episode isn’t any less impressive: young stoats playing wild games to practice stalking, chasing, ambushing in the English countryside; unbelievable slow-motion capture of greater bulldog bats fishing in a stream in the rain forest of Belize; the cutest ibex kids learning to bound along the precipitous cliffs above the Dead Sea to outwit cunning foxes; a dozen Ethiopian wolves, high up in the mountains, hunting separately (rather than in packs), while the dominant female guards her litter; bears feasting on the spawning salmon run along the Alaskan coast; orcas snatching stray elephant seals off the Falklands, but only a single female knows how to catch a seal pup inside the pool along the shore. Truly a must see!

Life: Insects

Before saying, “ew, gross,” consider that this is BBC Life, one of the most astounding nature documentaries you have ever seen. But, yes, this time the subject is about insects. We are privileged to view – up-close and in magnificent detail – ants, flies, bugs, beetles, bees, butterflies, stick insects, praying mantis, and vast clouds of mayflies, all in their natural surroundings. Some of the highlights include a stag beetle climbing 80 feet up a tree trunk in Chilean Patagonia, hurling male rivals with his enormous jaw horns to find a mate; millions of alkali flies in California’s hyper-saline Mono Lake eating algae under water, living unchallenged until phalarope birds stop over on their winter migration; a swarm of bees defending their colony’s honey combs to the death from a sweet-toothed black bear cub; a South African oogpister (Afrikaans for “eye-pisser”) beetle hunting for ants, until they all bite his ankles and drive him off, then firing off formic acid (digested from the ants) to ward off an inquisitive mongoose; a female Japanese red bug feeding her nest until her death, including demanding new arrivals from another mother who failed to provide for her nymphs; huge Dawson’s bees killing each other in rolling brawls over females emerging from their burrows in the desert ground of Australia’s outback; a colony of several million grass-cutter ants in Argentina, carrying blades of grass to their subterranean metropolis where they farm fungus gardens from which they feed themselves; a female damselfly mating within one day of her adult life, while black winged males battle for her favor in southern France, after which she needs to lay her eggs under water, while evading hopping hungry frogs; an astonishing billion monarch butterflies migrating from as far north as Canada’s Lake Erie to hibernate in a small patch of forest high up in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. You have to see it all to believe it! It’s miraculous!

Life: Birds

When we return to BBC’s nature documentary Life, the subject this time are birds. We witness again the magnificent dance of courtship performed by Clark’s grebes on the waters of Lake Oregon; a humming bird is shown in slow motion to view his rapid wing beats while he is hovering in the air of the Peruvian Andes to catch a female’s attention by waiving the flags at the end of his spatuletail; an enormous lammergeier is soaring through the air of Ethiopia’s Simien mountains at 15,000 feet, grabbing bones left over after griffon vultures devoured a carcass, then smashing the bones onto rocks so that he can swallow the fractures; red-billed tropicbirds marauded by imposing Man O’ War frigatebirds to steal their catch off Little Tobago in the Caribbean; most of the entire Atlantic red knots population resting on their flight from Argentina to Canada in the Delaware Bay so as to feed on stray eggs of horse-shoe crabs coming ashore with the highest springtide; flamingos nesting in Kenya’s caustic soda lakes; penguins climbing clumsily on the ash covered glaciers of Antarctica’s Deception Island only to search for their chicks among a 150,000 birds; pelicans on Dassen Island off the South African coast feeding gannet chicks to their own offspring; Wyoming sage grouse strutting their feathers while puffing their chest to impress the females; and if we’re talking about impressive feathers, we cannot overlook the beautifully flamboyant birds of paradise; but what struck me most was the sweetly artistic bowers (hut-shaped seductions parlors) colorfully designed by the Vogelkop bowerbirds in New Guinea – and in the special feature at the end we learn it took the team three weeks to catch the mere seconds of the bowerbirds mating. Certainly well worth watching!

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!

Life: Mammals

The third installment of BBC’s breathtaking nature documentary “Life” is all about mammals. As always, this show offers astounding images of the Earth’s environments. For that alone it’s worth watching. But this episode also shows us the life, habitat, and behavior of some darn fascinating creatures: a rufous sengi (elephant shrew) in equatorial Africa running for her life; an aye-aye (lemur) on the prowl for food at night in Madagascar; meerkats nodding off on a warm day in the Kalahari Desert; coati, a South American kind of raccoon, rummaging for food in a gang of forty; fruit bats flying in their millions across the Congo forest through a thunderstorm on a full-moon night to Zambia; a clan of spotted hyenas attacking a pride of lions to steal their prey; a Weddell seal, the only mammal able to survive on Antarctica, the most hostile environment on Earth, feeding her youngster while shielding him from a blizzard; millions of reindeer trekking across the Arctic tundra; polar bears competing over the huge carcass of a bowhead whale; and forty-ton humpback whales (the largest animals on earth) rivaling with each other in a heat run for the favor of a single female. Just incredible.

Horizon: The Universe

In the Beginning there was Nothing and Nothing was in the Beginning. Then, in one Cosmic Explosion Everything was Created and in a Big Bang the Universe came into Existence. Energy became Matter and out of Darkness came Light. And when Darkness was Night and Light was Day, so there was Time. Then Stars moved across the Universe, and so there was Space. This is the Creation Myth of Modern Science. Is it wrong? Doesn’t it sound frightfully familiar? Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? That’s the question the most recent installment of my favorite program BBC Horizon asks. First of all, this Creation Myth cannot explain the origin of Time and Space; it leaves open the question what came Before and what is Beyond. A while ago we spoke about the Inflation Theory of the Universe, which implies that there are an infinite number of universes infinitely expanding. This theory helps to explain why temperature remains constant throughout the universe, which shouldn’t be the result of a giant explosion, but could be due to inflation.

Another problem is that galaxies do not behave according to the laws of gravity: they move like a disc, with all the stars within a galaxy going at the same speed, rather than going faster the closer they get to the gravitational center. So another theory was proposed to account for this behavior. Can you guess what they called the theory? “Dark Matter”! Ooh, how sinister! Recent observations, moreover, appear to have discovered a motion of galactic clusters in the same direction (i.e., rather than outward), which has been dubbed “Dark Flow.” Evil, dark flow! Even more recent observations have lead to the conclusion that the universe isn’t just expanding infinitely, but is in fact expanding at an accelerated rate. This can only mean that there is some mysterious increase of cosmic energy, which – as you can guess by now – has been dubbed “Dark Energy”... A cosmic big bang, invisible dark matter, evil dark flow, omnipresent dark energy... It does make you wonder... we must be missing something, because this can’t be how the universe operates. There are too many exceptions and additional explanations required to make the theory work. Perhaps one day our children or our children’s children will learn an entirely new Creation Myth in school!

Progressive Rock

BBC 4 recently ran a program, Prog Rock Britannia: An Observation in Three Movements. I’ve been a sincerely devoted fan, I mean an avid collector, of progressive rock since the late eighties. In that respect I may have been born in the wrong era, but I was sure raised with this genuinely weird music: King Crimson, Yes, E.L.P. (Emerson, Lake & Palmer), Genesis, Jethro Tull, Soft Machine, Egg, you name it! We skip the light fandango of Procul Harum, gather our psychedelia, our Beach Boys and Bach, Beethoven and Bartok, our Beat Boom and Weed and Jazz, and the crowd called out for more. And so it was that later, two weeks later, to be precise, that the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). The late sixties were the germination period of the genre, mostly influenced by psychedelic rock (Pink Floyd, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the Nice, Tomorrow) and Jimi Hendrix.

The early seventies were the true classical era of progressive rock, when technical virtuosity combined with classical composition, when lyrics explored grand fantasy worlds, when chords revealed unheard harmonies and instruments displayed sounds never met before, when songs extended beyond ten minutes and time signatures shifted from 5/8 and 7/8 to 21 and 25, if you could keep up! This is the period of Close to the Edge and Nursery Cryme, Brain Salad Surgery and Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, and of course the ultimate prog rock send up Thick As a Brick (all ’72-73)! I really adore this kind of music, quaint and outdated as much of it will appear to unfamiliar ears. Perhaps it’s my attention-deficit disorder, my hyperactive mind, but this music engages me intellectually – and while this music may not be gratifying emotionally, prog rock gets me involved, amazes me, impresses me, and in the process transports me to wondrous worlds.

By the mid seventies things went over the top. Yes journeyed across Topographical Oceans with Tales that spanned entire album sides, four extended tracks on a double album. Genesis went all pomp and circumstance where the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Emerson, Lake & Palmer sought fame and fortune to Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends. (All 1974.) Then Queen came and brought the tune back. A Night At the Opera (1975), “Bohemian Rhapsody,” still progressive, still a lengthy three-part composition with the “opera” bit stuck in the middle, but it rocks and people all over the world can sing along with it, drunk or not. “Scaramouch, will you do the fandango?” And then Sex Pistols took a piss and brought three-minute rock back. No fills, no solos, three chords, and crap sound production. Never Mind the Bollocks (1977). “Prog” became a four letter word and it wasn’t until the mid-nineties that people here and there started whispering the term again. That’s not in the program, but it’s thanks to bands like Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Tool and Opeth that “progressive” is no longer a derogatory, dirty word. Thank heavens for small mercies!

Horizon: The Human Mind

Let’s probe again into the human mind, with a recent installment of BBC Horizon, asking the question “What Makes a Genius?” Can science explain Shakespeare, Newton, Mozart, Einstein, Kasparov, The Beatles? Let’s pop open a cool brewsky and get some chips, this is going to be interesting! I thought that maybe we ought to start with defining what exactly a genius is, otherwise, you know, you’ll end up arguing over semantics... But the program failed in that respect. They use synonyms, such as “extreme talent,” “incredible intelligence,” and “uninhibited imagination.” Mostly, the program discusses intelligence, particularly with respect to mathematics. So there’s a lot of talk about how to measure intelligence, whether intelligence is genetically acquired, whether it depends on brain structure and/or brain patterns, or if it can be learned by anyone. Although interesting, ultimately much remains vague.

From watching mice in cages with manipulated genes we learn that the process of learning depends on the ability of making neurological connections that allow us to remember our experiences and implement the lesson in similar future events. Of course we all know about those ridiculous IQ tests kids have to go through these days – and how much they actually fail to predict anything. Patterns in our brain activity, however, seem to indicate a predisposition to certain talents. And then there are all those silly “Mozart for Baby Genius” CDs... That leads to unanswered questions about the importance of nurture, upbringing, the environment in which you grow up. And it’s only toward the end that we get a fascinating bit about creativity. Here we hear about our brain’s inhibitory and excitatory urges that help us include or exclude external stimuli, meaning that with a lower inhibitory and higher excitatory urge our brain processes more external stimuli which in turn increases our creativity. The show makes no mention of drugs, but I thought that’s exactly why many artists take drugs. I don’t know, should I complain? I’m a big fan of this program, but I feel that this installment was quite a disappointment.