Tag Archives: David Attenborough

Blue Planet II, episode 2

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Blue Planet 2. Problem solving and coordinated group action by clownfish. Who knew? Besides other clownfish, I mean. And what’s with the meter long carnivorous worm? Teeth sharp as pinking shears, hence the name: Bobbitt. As in Lorena. David Attenborough left that part out (no pun intended).The damn things can get up to ten feet, I read, like sandworms in Dune. They can lop a foot long fish clean in half. A Devonian Era nightmare, giant meat eating invertebrates. Acid visions of carnivorous trilobites. Thankfully they went instinct first.

Then the scene with hundreds of reef sharks swimming menacingly above thousands of groupers. Suddenly l’amour drives the groupers mad and they rush upward into the sharks, shedding eggs and milt to the seven seas. The sharks go into a feeding frenzy and the surging waters are all blood and roe and sperm, a veritable fish fuck massacre. Stella!

The clownfish were so neat and orderly and mannered in comparison. They’ll go far. Check back in a hundred million years.

(Originally posted on BricksScience.com in 2018).

Gamera

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Saw the 1995 Gamera reboot last night. Awesome. Scientific, intellectual, and they flatten Tokyo. He’s—wait, is he a he? There’s no huge swinging giant monster balls, but he does have a violent streak for a turtle—anyway, he fights this neo-Rodan whose name escapes me and they totally fuck up everything scientifically and intellectually. All that plus the usual paleontologists, doomed fishermen, panicky city folk and suicidal reporters. Lots of tanks and jets and rocket launchers, too, plus the occasional pathos. And if some of Gamera’s behavioral traits–bipedalism, fire breathing, spinning, flying, even the touching inter-species empathy–test the credulity of testudine phylogeny, it makes for some groovy giant monster action sequences. So while not exactly David Attenborough, it certainly stands as the Citizen Kane of giant turtle movies.

Blue Planet 2

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Blue Planet 2. Problem solving and coordinated group action by clownfish. Who knew? Besides other clownfish, I mean. And what’s with the meter long carnivorous worms? Teeth sharp as pinking shears, hence the name: Bobbitt. As in Lorena. David Attenborough left that part out. The damn things can get up to ten feet, I read, like the sandworms in Dune. They can lop a foot long fish clean in half. A Devonian Era nightmare, giant meat eating invertebrates. Acid visions of carnivorous trilobites. Thankfully trilobites went extinct long before we ever got here. (Nor were they ever giant, nor scary, nor anything but invertebratefully adorable, like the little darlings scattered about the bookshelves here.)

Then the scene with hundreds of reef sharks swimming menacingly above thousands of groupers. Suddenly l’amour drives the groupers mad and they rush upward into the sharks, shedding eggs and milt to the seven seas. The sharks go into a feeding frenzy and the surging waters are all blood and roe and sperm, a veritable fish fuck massacre. There seems to be something dreadfully amiss there. Or not. No one ever said natural selection was logical. Ghastly, maybe.

The clownfish were so neat and orderly and mannered in comparison. They’ll go far. Check back in a hundred million years. Groupers will have vanished and clownfish will be talking and thinking vast, deep thoughts.