Watching Our Water Ways

In today’s featured video, National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen calmly describes his underwater encounter with a massive leopard seal in the Antarctic.

I guess Nicklen was not so calm at the time, as he tells in his narration, but he stayed in place and kept shooting as the leopard seal made moves toward him that could be interpreted in various ways. Nicklen, who has plenty of experience around wild animals, said the seal acted aggressive at first but later tried to make a connection, perhaps by offering the diver a penguin to eat.

Nicklen, who has been working in the polar regions for 17 years, had a “unique childhood among the Intuit in Canada’s Arctic,” according to his bio. He has shot some amazing and exciting scenes, and I’m an admirer of his images of the spirit bear, which is another unique story. See the spirit bear photos on his webpage, and check out the National Geographic story by Bainbridge Island writer Bruce Barcott. Nicklen lives on Vancouver Island.

As for leopard seals, they are pretty amazing creatures, though not always amusing. Take a look at this series of videos by BBC Nature. You can also swim with a leopard seal via a “crittercam” in this National Geographic video, which features the work of biologist Tracey Rogers. (The crittercam part starts about halfway through.)

Another crittercam captures the movements of an Australian sea lion as it hunts for and eventually eats an octopus. The National Geographic footage is from a project designed to figure out what the sea lions are eating. Australian sea lions were once hunted to near-extinction but are now protected by the Australian government.

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Scanning a 100-foot blue whale an inch at a time is an impressive way to gain a perspective on the world’s largest animal.

If you allow yourself a meditative moment, this Flash-based graphic offers a rare form of amusement. Warning: Don’t be in a hurry when you open this web page, brought to us by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. Ready? CLICK HERE.

The scrolling image of the whale is purported to be “life-size,” while a second image of the entire animal serves as a map for navigating the massive body.

According to Greener Magazine, the graphic was created by the German ad agency Jung von Matt using Soulpix 3D animation. It is made up of 10,000 JPEG images, which the Flash engine downloads at the appropriate time while the whale “swims” by. The entire image is more than 80Mb.

(more…)

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Note: I’m on vacation for the next 10 days, so I’m repeating an “Amusing Monday” entry from Aug. 4, 2008, which features a “National Geographic” video dramatizing a battle between a shark and an octopus.

When I first ran this item, I did not know for sure where this action took place. I later got the full story of the shark-versus-octopus battle from staff at the Seattle Aquarium. See “Amusing Monday” for Aug. 12, 2008.

As for my vacation, I’m sticking around home, so I may post a few blog entries if I get a chance.
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This might not be the kind of story that triggers the normal kind of laughter.

In fact, now that I think about it, this video ought to come with a warning. “Caution: This video contains violence of the animal kind.” OK, it’s really not that bad.

I’ve been trying to figure out where this event took place. The animals involved are Northwest natives, but the video does not say which aquarium was involved. I’ve put in an inquiry to National Geographic, but they have not checked back yet.

An Internet search reveals several comments linking this event to the Seattle Aquarium, but none of them are official sites. At least one site mentions a connection with the Oregon Coast Aquarium. If anybody knows more, please let me know.

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National Geographic has posted a remarkable five-minute video of a newborn baby blue whale to promote the its new television production “Kingdom of the Blue Whale” on National Geographic Channel. It’s the first time that such a sight has have been captured on video.

By now, you may have heard of the remarkable discoveries by whale researchers, including John Calambokidis of Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia. National Geographic helped fund the venture, which followed blue whales on a migration route to a social gathering point known as the Costa Rica Dome.

This month’s National Geographic magazine features a story by Ken Brower about the adventure, which includes this description:

The Costa Rica Dome is an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water generated by a meeting of winds and currents west of Central America. The location is not fixed; it meanders a bit, but the dome is reliably encountered somewhere between 300 and 500 miles offshore. The upwell­ing brings the thermocline — the boundary layer between deep, cold water and the warm water of the surface — up as high as 30 feet from the top. Upwelling with the cold, oxygen-poor water from the depths come nitrate, phos­phate, silicate, and other nutrients. This manna, or anti-manna — a gift not from heaven but from the deep — makes for an oasis in the sea. The upwelling nutrients of the dome fer­tilize the tiny plants of the phytoplankton, which feed the tiny animals of the zooplankton, which bring bigger animals, some of which are very big indeed.

The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest creature ever to live. Linnaeus derived the genus name from the Latin balaena, “whale,” and the Greek pteron, “fin” or “wing.” His species name, musculus, is the diminutive of the Latin mus, “mouse”—apparently a Linnaean joke. The “little mouse whale” can grow to 200 tons and 100 feet long. A single little mouse whale weighs as much as the entire National Football League. Just as an elephant might pick up a little mouse in its trunk, so the elephant, in its turn, might be taken up by a blue whale and carried along on the colossal tongue. Had Jonah been injected intravenously, instead of swallowed, he could have swum the arterial vessels of this whale, boosted along every ten seconds or so by the slow, godlike pulse.

Calambokidis tells of his personal experience in an interesting radio interview by Boyd Matson on National Geographic Weekend.

I’m eager to see the documentary in high definition. Reviews of the program have been over the top. A collaborative review on “Biochemical Soul” offers this praise: “For those of you who don’t want to read the whole review, here is all you need to know: ‘Kingdom of the Blue Whale’ is stunning! It’s beautiful. It’s sad. It pisses you off. Then it wows you some more. Then it saddens you again. Then it’s uplifts you and then leaves you thinking, ‘We’ve got to save them!’”

Here are some “fast facts” condensed from information taken from the Web site of this production.

Blue whales are the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth. Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant.

They reach these mind-boggling dimensions on a diet composed nearly exclusively of tiny shrimplike animals called krill. An adult blue whale consumes about 4 tons of krill a day.

Blue whales live in all the world’s oceans, occasionally swimming in small groups but usually alone or in pairs. They often spend summers feeding in polar waters and undertake lengthy migrations towards the Equator as winter arrives.

Blue whales are among the loudest animals on the planet. They emit a series of pulses, groans, and moans. It’s thought that, in good conditions, blue whales can hear each other up to 1,000 miles.

Blue whale calves enter the world already ranking among the planet’s largest creatures. After about a year inside its mother’s womb, a baby blue whale emerges weighing up to 3 tons and stretching to 25 feet. It gorges on nothing but mother’s milk and gains about 200 pounds every day for its first year.

Between 1900 and the mid-1960s, some 360,000 blue whales were slaughtered and nearly became extinct. Since coming under international protection, they’ve managed a minor recovery to between 10,000 and 25,000 in the world today.

Blue whales have few predators but are known to fall victim to attacks by sharks and killer whales, and many are injured or die each year from impacts with large ships.

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Last week’s “Amusing Monday” entry was indeed shot at the Seattle Aquarium — and there’s more to the story than meets the eye.

The announcer in the video doesn’t say where the scene was shot, so I put out a request for information. Thanks go to Susan Berta of Orca Network for putting me in touch with folks at Seattle Aquarium, which ultimately led to an interview with biologist and lead diver Jeff Christiansen, who was involved in shooting the video.

Photo courtesy of Seattle Aquarium

Before 1987, the dome exhibit often included three octopuses — the number required to almost guarantee that people would see one, Christiansen told me. The octopuses would hang out in a recessed area under the lower windows inside the tank, he said. That was before the rocky reefs were installed.

Also in the tank were a number of dogfish sharks, another native of the Puget Sound region. But not all the dogfish survived.

“If you were lucky enough, you could see it happen,” he said. “They would wait for fish to swim by, then you’d see the arms flash out and a bit of a struggle. Whatever the octopus didn’t eat was chucked out.”

Frequently, aquarium workers would arrive in the morning to see the remains right in front of the viewing windows. The middle of the dogfish carcasses were completely eaten down to the bones, but the head and tail were intact.

“It was considered bad to have dead animals sitting down there in the tank when you opened up (the exhibit) in the morning,” Christiansen said.

Divers, who normally went into the tanks in the afternoon, had to put on their gear and make a special trip into the tank, he said. Today, divers are in the tank several times a day.

Although the sharks were easy to replace, especially in those days, aquarium managers were worried about losing rare and valuable fish, he said. In fact, once an octopus was able to eat a sizable salmon before the decision was made to take the octopus out.

Anyway, about 10 years ago, Mike DuGruy of National Geographic Films was doing a feature on octopuses when he heard the story about the shark-eating creatures.

“He came to us and asked if we could recreate the situation,” Christiansen said. “Being the film-whores we are, we said ‘sure.’”

The details of the recreation are somewhat proprietary, Christiansen said. But that’s how the dramatic battle of the shark and the octopus came to be a National Geographic story.

Today, with the recent remodel of the aquarium, octopuses have their own space. With divers in the tanks several times a day, they could feed the octopuses enough so the animals wouldn’t go after fish, Christiansen said. Still no decisions have been made to put octopuses back in the big tank.

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