Evolutionarily, sharks are very ancient going back to 400 million years. Great whites however have evolved quite recently during the Miocene period at about 20 million years ago. Shark biologists have debated for more than 150 years whether the ancestral origin of the great whites were from the Megalodons. A recent study of a 4 million year old shark fossil from Peru have shown that great whites were more related to mako sharks and didn’t evolve from Megalodon sharks.

As a biologist who studied gene flow hearing about extreme cases have always inspired me. In July 2008 fishermen of Altınoluk contacted marine scientists about two newborn great white sharks they caught. A research team from the Bosphorus and the Istanbul University collaborated with an international team of shark scientists and made a genetic analysis on the tissue taken from the pups. Results published in 2010 have confirmed that sharks were not siblings. When their genetic make-up were compared against a global database it turned out that they were most related to the Australian population. Further genetic analysis also revealed another very striking fact. The Mediterranean population remained isolated for about 450 thousand years. This is indeed an ancient and epic walkabout from an ocean half a world away literally.

On July 6th 2011, fishermen of Altınoluk caught another great white pup and this time it was alive. Before releasing her back to nature they did a great job of documenting this extremely rare and endangered specimen. Biologists have had some curiosity whether certain locations in the Mediterranean may serve as a nursery for great white sharks. Generally for top predators greatest mortality for the young comes from predation. Females may prefer to give birth to their young in places where adult population is minimal so that their pups find refuge. For example the Sicilian channel, near the Italian island of Lampedusa, is one such location where both pregnant females and newly born great whites have been reported. With three pups caught in trammel nets for two consecutive summers Altınoluk must be marked on the map as a nursery for the great white. For instance, Boncuk Bay in southwestern Turkey is a known nursing ground for the sandbar sharks (Carcharhinus plumbeus):

A journey from New Zealand to the eastern Mediterranean? This is literally half a world away. Lets review possible scenarios for how this ancient shark walkabout might have happened. Strait of Gibraltar is the only natural gate through which species can enter to colonize the Mediterranean. As expected Eastern Mediterranean is the last place for an Atlantic species to colonize (but this hypothesis is clearly not true for the great white). There’s no geological evidence that Mediterranean was connected to the Red Sea within the past few hundred thousand years. Therefore we will have to dismiss the Lessepsian colonization (unless there’s a yet undiscovered underground sea tunnel as Jules Verne famously fantasized in Arabian Tunnel chapter of his book 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Seas) from the Red Sea.

The most likely explanation is that a few individuals probably drifted north in the Atlantic from South Africa. At around 400 – 450 thousand years ago sea levels were 20m higher than today. The well-known strong Agulhas currents can do this trick. Once sharks drift that way up the only seaway they could follow resembling their natural eastbound migration towards Australia is through the Gibraltar. The rest is a classic case of population dynamics known as founder effect in which a population starts with a small number of individuals and as a consequence the genetic diversity is rather poor. Ecologically, the Mediterranean is a very low productivity sea. Narrow base of the food web makes it energetically rather difficult for large apex predators to survive. Perhaps in the past they were able to sustain themselves by preying upon the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) an endangered species with a restricted population in the Eastern Mediterranean. Therefore if there is a resident population the adult density must be very low. Great white sightings in the Mediterranean are extremely rare.

Individuals tagged by satellite transmitters have shown that adult sharks migrate pretty regularly between Australia and South Africa. Similar long distance migration along east-west axis has been documented by the Monterey Bay Aquarium where a tagged female great white made a return trip between California and Hawaii. This shark was tagged near Point Reyes on November 30th in 2004. She stayed along the California coast for several months and in February went straight to Hawaii, one of the well-known offshore winter/spring destination for great white sharks. She swam in a very straight line at a constant speed of around 100 km per day completing her journey in about a month. From February to June, the shark remained near the Hawaiian Islands regularly diving to 500 m. In June the tag stopped logging due to battery failure. The tag was found by a beachcomber only 40 miles from where it was tagged around Christmas of 2005. Apparently, the tag came loose after the shark had returned to California. A two year satellite telemetry work done by researchers at Marine Science Research Institute has shown that pregnant females travel between the mating area at Guadalupe Island and nursery in Baja California.

Satellite tagging data collected from adult great whites began to reveal a 3 dimensional picture of their movement patterns. We are mostly accustomed to their surface swimming which has become a stereotype for all sharks. In the less deep waters along the coast great whites could be found at any depth. One of those curious patterns is “yo-yo swimming” where individuals have been recorded to make repeated dives and climbs from surface to seabed. They also have been recorded swimming along the ocean floor. They may do “spike dives” often around dawn and dusk. In the open ocean, on the other hand, they may swim on the surface or several hundred meters deep, sometimes diving as deep as 1000 meters.

Despite their low numbers, sharks have an interesting reproductive biology and great whites can maintain a population for a long time. We know almost next to nothing about the reproductive behavior of great whites but a video of nurse sharks may give us an idea (see below). In the absence of males female sharks can make babies by doubling the chromosomes of their eggs through a process known as parthenogenesis. Sharks have XY genetic determination system just like humans. Therefore pups born this way will always be female and will not re-stock the depleted male population.

There has been quite a few attempts to tag juvenile great white. In 2001 Pfleger Institute of Environmental Research managed to attach a tag and collected 27-days-long recording of a baby great white. In 2008 a very detailed report of juvenile great white sharks tagged in Australia was published by CSIRO. Virtually nothing is known about juvenile sharks in other seas including the Mediterranean. Therefore as a nursery site Altınoluk requires immediate attention of shark biologists. First week of July is a critical time for catching live pups for satellite tagging.

Squished among three continents the Mediterranean is a special sea with very different ecological and geological properties from other temperate seas. It has a quite adventurous geological history. To illustrate, imagine this extreme event that took place 5.6 million years ago. During a period known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis the Mediterranean lost its connection to the Atlantic. The crisis lasted about 300 thousand years and by the end of it the entire basin dried completely. Then a crack appeared in Gibraltar and the basin re-filled rapidly in just a few thousand years.

Productions made about great whites almost invariably are obsessed with the size of this charismatic fish. Here in Nature Documentaries we are proud to present you the opposite end of the spectrum: the smallest great white ever documented on film.

Finally, enjoy this most awe-inspiring breach sequence from BBC in slow motion and be informed that contrary to the common belief sharks do get cancer:

The second episode of the series was filmed in Idaho in August 2012. It covers exquisitely preserved fossil remains of a long-vanished forest from 20 million years ago:

Plants unfortunately get less attention from wildlife filmmakers. This is most probably due to a narration problem. For example, when we see animals in a video we more or less can guess what we are seeing. Natural history of plants require some powerful story telling simply because their life cycles and interactions with the community are not very obvious.

The third episode of the series focuses on Eastern skunk cabbage. It was filmed in the Adirondack Mountain region with guest Dr. Rachel Schultz, assistant professor of wetland ecology at SUNY Plattsburgh:

Evolutionarily, sponges are considered to be the oldest and most ancestral surviving species of the multicellular animal lineage going back to more than 750 million years ago. They are notorious filter feeders. They have an extraordinary capacity to filter dissolved nutrients through a specialized group of cells called choanocyte. Encrusting sponge tissues are made of choanocytes forming canals that converge at the openings called oscula where filtered water is discharged like a chimney.

A species of Star Encrusting Sponge Halisarca caerulea grows in the deep dark cavities beneath reefs, and 90% of their diet is composed of dissolved organic carbon. The sponge must filter vast amounts of organic carbon in order to survive in the nutrient poor environment it lives. Every day these sponges consume half of their own weight in organic compounds, yet they hardly ever grow. Jasper De Goeij and his study group started studying these sponges in Dutch Antilles. Sponges collected from reefs were placed in small chambers and were exposed to 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine (BrdU). The BrdU is incorporated into the DNA of dividing cells if they take up carbon and grow. However the chemical label was nowhere to be found. Cells were very quick to divide (in less than 4.5 h) yet no carbon was stored.

It turned out that choanocytes were shedding at a very high rate. Tiny piles of brown material could be seen next to the sponges growing in enclosures every morning. The sponges were shedding the newly divided cells providing reef residents food to consume. In this way, a significant resource found diluted in water column is concentrated for utilization of higher trophic levels such as reef fish.

Major groups of reef sessile animals, such as polychaetes (tube worms), bivalves and gastropods, barnacles, sponges, tunicates and corals can filter and accumulate particles from the surrounding water column. Sponges have a much greater role in reef ecosystems than previously known. They are especially efficient in converting much finer dissolved organic carbon into edible particles, providing an important food source for other organisms.

In terrestrial environments our understanding of biomass production is rather dominated by primary producers like plants. We do not have an analogous organism that function by filter-feeding like the sponge. Instead we have super-organisms like ant colonies collecting and concentrating large amounts of nutrients into point sources. For instance, take the fungus gardens grown by the leaf cutter ants. Leaves widely available but largely inedible are collected throughout the forest column and fed to the subterranean fungus. Fungus metabolizes the leaf material and produce fruiting bodies which ants feed on. The sponge and the fungus consume vast amounts of carbon but don’t grow. Instead feed others.

Knowledge of sponge biology and ecology has direct effect on management of aquatic ecosystems. When designing artificial reefs special effort should be made to create habitats suitable for their proliferation. Vertical hard structures can create upwelling water movement carrying dissolved nutrients. Algae have hardtime growing on vertical surfaces simply because of the diminished angle of light driving photosythesis. Plant life therefore are limited to flat sunny surfaces on reefs. Sponges turn non-productive surfaces into an extra source expanding the base of food chain.

This documentary was recorded by Mert Gökalp in Curacao last September 2012. It was aired on Netherlands’ TV broadcaster NTR-HET KLOKHUIS in 31st of October same year. Gökalp is also the author of an underwater field guide book covering species found along Turkish coast.

But before that was this caterpillar eating another caterpillar? Some species accumulate toxins in their bodies as a defense against parasitoid wasps by eating other toxic species. Perhaps this is what was going on? Those fuzzy hair are most certainly not something to mess with…

Therefore, I asked some nature enthusiasts + experts in Discover Life. Firstly, this was NOT a cannibalistic behavior. The caterpillar was actually eating its own discarded skin. This is quite common among caterpillars. In this way, once they shed they can recycle the defensive chemicals. These defensive chemicals usually are metabolically rather costly to produce. The behavior is somewhat similar to mammals eating the placenta after the offspring is born.
The caterpillar is a member of Arctiidae which includes all the Tiger Moths and this was most probably the Virginian Tiger Moth (Spilosoma virginica).

This is arguably one the best nest cams with amazing scenery and natural sounds.

The documentary follows a new honeypot ant queen founding a new colony together with a few more queens. She then wages an Machiavelli style battle for survival as her colony grows. Eliminating rivals with ruthless efficiency, sacrificing thousands in her quest for domination, murder, cannibalism, genocide – she will do anything to keep her crown.

Empire of the Ants is the epic story of one honeypot ant queen’s dramatic rise to power and her brutal fall from grace.

Ant expert Professor Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University said: “These queens were not related… They originated from different colonies, but nevertheless they co-operated during colony foundation. The main reason for that seems to be that young colonies compete with one another and raid each other, stealing the brood from other colonies. The larger the colony, the better it is at raiding neighboring colonies.”

Bert Hölldobler is a leading entomologist (scientist who studies insects). He collaborated with Harvard ant biologist E.O. Wilson and developed the field of Sociobiology. He first documented the “slave-making” behaviour of honeypot ants in 1976. Since then, he has studied the ants’ complex social behavior.

You can watch Hölldobler featured in a 2006 documentary “Ants – Natures Secret Power”.

Flaherty had a very immersive personality. He liked story telling and sharing his work instantly with his native collaborators. Immediately after shooting he was keen to develop and print the film and show it to his fellows in a makeshift movie theater. For example after filming the walrus hunt scene, he wrote:

“I lost no time in developing and printing the film. That walrus fight was the first film these Eskimo had ever seen and, in the language of the trade, it was a ‘knock-out.’ The audience — they thronged the post kitchen to the point of suffocation — completely forgot the picture. To them the walrus was real and living. The women and children in their high shrill voices joined with the men in shouting admonitions, warnings and advice to Nanook and his crew as the picture unfolded on the screen. The fame of that picture spread through all the country. … After this it did not take my Eskimo long to see the practical side of films and … from that time on, they were all with me.”

Before Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, there were a few filmmakers who had focused on the daily lives of people. The Lumière Brothers for example recorded short clips of less than one minute each and used them as a medium for mass consumption. However these projections had no binding theme or a story telling component. Flaherty’s approach was revolutionary in merging the narrative power of cinema with the reality of ordinary life. He successfully captured the relationship of man with nature in extreme habitats. First review of the movie was published in New York Times in June 12 1922. Thus was born the genre of documentary.

Since then, many filmmakers carried Flaherty’s flag in capturing scenes of ethnographical value. In 1925 another movie called Grass: A Nations Battle for Life was released. The filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and his team were not aware of Flaherty’s Nanook by that time. They were also quite successful in capturing the struggle between man and nature by filming migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari people. Both films were selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Ground truthing of Flaherty’s documentation came from Dr. Asen Balikci of the Montreal University. In 1967 he went to Inuit country to film the ways of the Arctic people. Balikci’s Netsilik Eskimo Series beautifully complements Flaherty’s in an academic style known as visual anthropology.

Flaherty later on wrote an account of his experience in an article titled ““Life Among Eskimos”” detailing his work.

As a final remark, you can have a better idea of the geographical setting Flaherty worked by watching the archival footage of the Ungava Peninsula in a documentary made in 1949 by Douglas Wilkinson and Jean P. Michéa:

Across Arctic Ungava by ONFB , National Film Board of Canada

The nest in Iowa is next to Decorah Fish Management Station. As a top predator highly adapted for fish prey the location provided an ideal setting for documenting their behavior.

Apex predators are important indicator species about health of the ecosystems. They are vulnerable to pollution arising from anthropological activities. Species at the top of the food chain can accumulate persistent toxic substances through a process known as biomagnification. Bald eagles came to the brink of extinction entirely because of human activities. Their story represents a textbook example of human-wildlife conflict. More than 120 thousand eagles were shot by unfounded reasons such as predation on lambs or snatching of little children. The heavy use of pesticides such as DDT also took its toll. In 1960s there were less than 400 breeding pairs left. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was the first whistle blowing book. Published in 1962 it has been highly influential for recognition of the biomagnification problem. Even today many bald eagles die because of lead poisoning when they eat carcasses of deer abandoned by hunters.

US declared the species as “endangered” in 1970s and the population is recovering. The documentary highlights this flagship project run by Raptor Resource Project which is producing scientifically valuable information about the population dynamics of a severely bottlenecked top predator. One curious question is the movement patterns of the newborn which has important implications for wildlife management. After the documentary was released, in 2011 and 2012 two juveniles (named D1 and D14) were tracked by fitting satellite transmitters. GPS coordinates from each individual provided spatial movement information and helped estimate gene flow in bald eagles. D1 traveled all the way up north close to the Arctic circle and impressed everyone. D1 continues to transmit GPS signals to the Argos satellite and as of morning of March 1st 2013 it was near Spillville, Iowa. D1 will turn two years old by April 3rd 2013. Other juvenile named D14 was found electrocuted under a utility pole. Electrocution is one of the major causes of mortality today. Bald eagles also get struck by cars when they are attracted to roadkills.

A pair of iconic Bald Eagles is preparing to raise their chicks in Central Minnesota for the 2013 breeding season. They are moving twigs around and laying fresh material on the snow covered nest. They also bring prey and consume on the nest. On 9th of March Mom got into labor at 3:53pm and laid her first egg. From now on parents will take turns to incubate and hunt:

Nature Documentaries has been following a number of high profile webcams some of them in urban setting. This webcam broadcasts a breeding pair in their natural setting and were also featured in a PBS documentary called “American Eagle” released in 2008.

Top predators are important indicator species about health of the ecosystems. They are vulnerable to pollution arising from anthropological activities. Species at the top of the food chain can accumulate persistent toxic substances through a process known as biomagnification. Bald eagles came to the brink of extinction because of heavy use of pesticides such as DDT. Silent Spring was the first whistle blowing book by Rachel Carson. Published in 1962 it has been highly influential for recognition of the biomagnification problem. Even today many bald eagles die because of lead poisoning when they eat carcasses of deer abandoned by hunters.

There were many high-points from last year that have attracted viewers from all over the world. One of them without doubt was the hatching of the first egg that received a lot of cheer:

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