Last night I was watching the "Planet Earth" series on Discovery & it is so crazy. First of all, the photography alone is completely unbelievable. They say that series was 5 years in the making, which I totally believe because some of those shots alone that they got must've taken months. I watched the "Shallow Seas" & "Deserts" & it was just nuts to see. It makes you really think about how complicated the world is. I love these kind of shows & I feel like I really learned a lot watching it.
They were saying on the show how certain things only happen once a year or even less then that, yet they got those shots of them. They even show the fog moving in over a desert. In the "Shallow Seas" episode they show the mama Humpback whale & her baby & got these insane close-ups. Apparently the mama starves herself for 8 months so the baby can grow in a safe place. Then they swim up to the Arctic Ocean & eat tons & tons of krill, which are micro-sized shrimp. She also will hold up the baby on the surface so it can breathe because babies get tired from swimming easily, which I thought was so cute. Dolphins are my favorite so I was happy when they included them. The fish apparently have been going closer & closer to shore so in order to eat, the dolphins actually hydroplaned along the beach to eat the fish. Of course they got all of this on video. Now I was lucky while at Miami to get the alligator on campus on video but that was sheer luck (SR said it was the best video he had ever seen a student get of the alligator, but I don't wanna toot the old horn.) These people are out there for months at a time to get a 30 second shot of these things & then they have to get enough of these 30 second clips to make an hour-long show! No wonder it took them 5 years.
But watching this it kind of made me sad because they were saying they don't know how much longer these amazing spectacles will be around because of man-made factors. Pollution, over-fishing, etc. are all killing everything beautiful in this world. I did a story on water pollution while at Miami & it was awful because I didn't have any good shots like they got on Discovery. I couldn't go underwater to show the difference between healthy coral & dying coral. I didn't have strong enough statistics like they had on this show. I wish I saw this before I had this project, maybe then I could've done a little better. But we really need to do something about this because it is so sad that maybe my children won't ever be able to see the things that I've seen, like a thriving reef or a humpback whale or even dolphins! The krill that the whales eat is being harvested for fertilizer & causing the whales to starve to death. I know a lot of people are skeptical about "going green" but it's really nothing to kid about, it's serious. If everyone contributed a little bit every day to do what they could to help the environment, we would be a lot better off. So turn the piece of paper over & use both sides instead of throwing it away & reuse your water bottles instead of buying a new one & walk a couple of blocks rather then take a cab because I dunno about you, but I want my kids to swim with dolphins.
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