Archives for January 2018 | Nature Documentaries

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A Sunfleck Over a Sapling in Barro Colorado Island

January 19, 2018 at 10:25 am / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

Recorded during the dry season on Jan 26th 2017 at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Barro Colorado Island, Panama. A short duration sunfleck passes over a sapling of Nectandra cissiflora (Lauraceae). Plants growing in the forest understory habitats can be exposed to fast microclimatic changes. Although light is essential for plants, sudden exposure to high light can be detrimental to shade adapted leaves. Sunflecks can be destructive for the photosystem II (PSII), a component of the photosynthetic apparatus […]

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A Chimpanzee’s Tale – Pierre Stine (2002)

January 16, 2018 at 9:26 am / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Illegal chimpanzee trade has been a big problem. Pet and animal circus industry has been trafficking these endangered animals by using brutal ways. Many lost their lives caught in snares. Naive pet owners eventually learn that chimps become very strong and hard to maintain in a Human-scale habitation. The organization HELP Congo has been combating the illegal chimpanzee trade and habitat loss through deforestation in Congo for many years and the film covers what happened after their first successful attempt […]

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Humpback Whales Bubble Fishing – BBC Earth (2015)

January 15, 2018 at 4:38 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video

Cetaceans are the largest animals on our planet. Whales could evolve into such enormous sizes only very recently through the geological time. This became possible due to pulses of nutrients coming from a cycle of glaciations fertilizing the seas for plankton growth. Feeding efficiency is a prerequisite for gigantism to evolve. Truly gigantic animals have always been close to the base of trophic levels and have found a way to maximize feeding on a rich food resource. Sauropod dinosaurs for […]

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Charting the Galaxy – from HIPPARCOS to Gaia – ESA

January 15, 2018 at 2:36 pm / Cosmological, Video

Gaia is an astrometry mission that is built as a continuation of the hugely successful HiPParCoS telescope: the High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite (HiPParCoS). Since 2013, Gaia has been generating the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy by surveying more than a thousand million stars. Gaia monitors every target star about 70 times over a five-year period recording their positions, distances, movements, and changes in brightness. It is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, […]

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Space Engine Universe Simulator

January 15, 2018 at 12:23 pm / Cosmological, Video

Space Engine is one impressive project all started by codes written by a single person Vladimir Romanyuk and it is all free! Space Engine is a purely exploratory environment. Almost all objects are real and astronomically mapped using scientific resources such as the HIPPARCOS Project of European Space Agency (ESA) which has now upgraded into the Gaia galaxy mapping mission, the historic 1888 compilation called the New General Catalog/Index Catalog (NGC/IC) of J.L.E. Dreyer, the Messier Objects, the International Astronomical […]

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Devonian Fossil Forest of Gilboa

January 10, 2018 at 5:23 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Video

Spectacularly preserved plant remains unearthed at the Riverside Quarry site in Gilboa, NY date from the Middle Devonian period, approximately 390 million years ago. The site of the “oldest fossil forest” was found in the 1920s. Here in this playlist you can watch six videos highlighting the findings. The videos feature two paleontologists William Stein of the Binghamtom University and Christopher Berry of Cardiff University. The Devonian period was a hugely transformational time for land plants evolving towards forest ecosystems. […]

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Largest Egg Mass Ever Observed – Lütfü Tanrıöver (2015)

January 9, 2018 at 12:55 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Short Observations

On July 9th 2015, a Turkish underwater videographer Lütfü Tanrıöver encountered a curious semi-transparent gelatinous mass at a depth of 22 meters (72 feet) while diving with his friends near his hometown of Fethiye on the Mediterranean coast of Anatolia. As every citizen scientist instinctively would, he explored and successfully recorded this observation of huge biological importance on film. It didn’t take long before the BBC Wildlife Service reached out to him about the observation. According to Dr. Michael Vecchione […]

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Sharing The Secrets – Drew Perlmutter (2015)

January 7, 2018 at 10:11 am / Ecological Documentaries, Video

Caves are powerfull places. Our ancestors were inevitably attracted to these geological formations. Prehistoric cave art that has flourished within the last 50 thousand years is an exciting demonstration of our ancestral relationship with these places. The filmmaker Drew Perlmutter brings the story of cave explorers in “TAG” region to the surface. The geology of the Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia is quite unique that has lead to many cave formations. In fact, the region is home to the highest concentration […]

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Forest Elephants – The New Yorker (2015)

January 4, 2018 at 10:00 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

African forest elephants have been featured in quite a few documentaries including the tropical rainforests episode of the Planet Earth series. Here in this short documentary we listen to Andrea Turkalo’s wonderful lecture on behavior of these charismatic megafaunal animals. She has been observing the elephants in Dzanga Research Camp at the Dzanga-Sangha National Park in Central African Republic for more than two decades. Andrea Turkalo is Associate Conservation Scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and cofounder of Cornell […]

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The Tiniest Fossils – Shelf Life/AMNH (2017)

January 3, 2018 at 9:20 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Video

Foraminiferans or “forams” are extremely fast responding single-celled shelled organisms to climatic changes. They can be extremely small for one could easily mistake foraminifera fossils for flecks of dust. Over thousands and millions of years these tiny specimens adjusted their shapes based on Earth’s climatic fluctuations. Here in this AMNH production scientific assistant Bushra Hussaini, researcher Ellen Thomas, curator Neil Landman, and intern Shaun Mahmood show how they are preserving this invaluable collection. Forams initially were mistaken for another kind […]

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Collecting the World: Inside the Smithsonian – Great Big Story (2017)

January 2, 2018 at 7:46 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Video

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMHM) in Washington D.C. was visited by more than 7.1 million people in year 2016. The museums rich collection has over 144 million different artifacts. Only a very small fraction (less than 1 percent) of these collections are on display to the public. The bottom of the iceberg, the 99 percent of the Smithsonian’s treasures remain behind the scenes. Scientists and curators work with these objects to study and understand the world we […]

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What is the Tragedy of the Commons? – Nicholas Amendolare | TED-Ed (2017)

January 1, 2018 at 8:46 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Human Nature, Video

The tragedy of the commons is an economic hypothesis popularized in 1968 by ecologist Garrett Hardin. The concept was examined in a 1987 BBC documentary called “Nice Guys Finish First” by Richard Dawkins with a game theoretical framework. The Tragedy of the Commons predicts ecological degradation due to human conflict of self-interest over the long-term well-being of their community. There are many examples of common resource exploitation such as destruction of cashew trees in Mozambic. However, this theory was heavily […]

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Kīlauea Summit Eruption | Lava Returns to Halemaʻumaʻu – USGS (2017)

January 1, 2018 at 12:18 pm / Global Patterns, Video

The sight of liquid molten rock is a stunning experience and has inspired many filmmakers to capture it. The Greek geographer Strabo provides the first historical and technical account of a lava field from a belt of extinct volcanoes in Turkey. This area is now declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In March 2008, a new volcanic vent opened within Halema‘uma‘u, a crater at the summit of Kīlauea Volcano in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park on the Island of Hawaiʻi. […]

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